Canberra just endured its coldest morning so far this year, with the temperature feeling like -10ºC shortly before sunrise.

A combination of clear skies, relatively light winds and a very cold air mass allowed temperatures to plummet across the ACT on Monday night into Tuesday morning.

Image: Lake Tuggeranong, ACT on Tuesday morning. Source: @eilleene4 / Instagram

The graph below shows how the night played out in Canberra. The temperature was sitting at 1.2ºC at midnight and the first sub-zero reading came in shortly after 1am. Then, after a few more hours of nocturnal cooling, the air temperature plunged to a low of -5.6ºC at 5:51am, which was Canberra’s lowest temperature so far this year.

Image: Temperature observations at Canberra Airport during the 24 hours ending at 10:10am on June 20, 2023.

The graph above shows the raw air temperature observed at Canberra Airport, which is measured inside a Stevenson Screen at a Bureau of Meteorology weather station. However, the temperature would have felt even colder than this for anyone that was outside and exposed to the wind and dry air in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

While the raw air temperature in Canberra dropped as low as -5.6ºC on Tuesday morning, the ‘feels like’ temperature got to a frigid -10.4ºC shortly before 6am.

Image: Frost outside Parliament House on Tuesday, June 20, 2023, Source: AAP/Lukas Coch

While temperatures like this are not uncommon in Canberra during winter, no other Australian state capital city has come close to getting this cold. The lowest temperature on record in another state capital was -2.8ºC, which has happened in Melbourne and Hobart.

Canberra will have another bitterly cold morning on Wednesday, with the temperature expected to drop to around -5ºC or -6ºC once again. Fortunately, the city’s minimum temperature will be closer to 0ºC on Thursday.