The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
25–27 JANUARY 1978 · THE STORM THE RECORDS MEASURE BY
The pressure: The Blizzard of 1978 holds two of Fort Wayne's strangest weather distinctions at once. It was the storm of Indiana's first statewide Blizzard Warning in history, issued at 3:45 p.m. on 25 January 1978 — no such warning had ever covered the whole state before. And as the storm's centre deepened to about 956 millibars over Michigan, Fort Wayne recorded the lowest barometric pressure in its history: 28.78 inches (975 millibars). Snow fell at one to two inches an hour into winds of 35 to 45 miles an hour; about seventeen inches lay on the ground by 27 January, January's total reached 25.3 inches, and the winter finished as the coldest in the city's records, a mean temperature of 17.8 degrees and 60.6 inches of snow for the season. The governor declared a statewide snow emergency; the State Police treated every road in Indiana as closed. Fort Wayne still measures its winters against that week — the standard is a barometer reading no storm before or since has matched.
Sources: the Events section of this history — National Weather Service, Northern Indiana, "The Blizzard of 1978" (the first statewide Blizzard Warning, the 956-millibar centre, Fort Wayne's lowest pressure of 28.78 inches, the snowfall and coldest-winter figures); NWS Indianapolis blizzard history.