It's a fascinating morning around the country, as about 60 million are waking up to sub-zero cold temperatures and in some cases, record cold. Here is KC; we've bottomed out at least at -9°. The previous record was -6° set in 1935. Topeka has dropped to at least -12°, which breaks their previous record of -11° going back to 1888! That is one of the longest records you can break with our record history around these parts. No record in St. Joseph; it appears as if they've dropped to around -9°. Their record is -11°, set in 1930. Lawrence dropped to an astounding -15°, which hasn't happened since December 18th, 1986! View the latest Weather Alerts in the Kansas City region on FOX4 Look at the sub-zero temperatures at around 8 AM this morning. As this happens, the cold has penetrated the deep south. There is also a storm down there creating their 1st EVER known blizzard in Louisiana. Yes, BLIZZARD warnings are in effect for the 1st time in southern LA. Incredible. Just a regular January day...not. Forecast Today: Sunny and remaining cold with highs in the mid to upper teens. The winds will start to increase later today and tonight with gusts to 20-25 mph possible this evening. Wind chills starting near -20° but will ease up this as the day moves along. Tonight: Steady to warming temperatures. We may start tomorrow near 20° with clouds moving into the region. Blustery too. Tomorrow: Variable clouds with some snow showers possible later in the day or evening. Accumulations look minor, although there may be some dustings/coatings farther north. Highs in the mid-30s with decreasing winds Thursday: Partly cloudy and getting colder with highs in the mid to upper 20s FOX4 Newsletters: Sign up for daily forecasts and Joe's Weather Blog in your inbox Discussion My goodness, this is quite the day. Last night I mentioned that today's date has the "highest" record low temperature for the month at -6° in 1935. So IF there was a vulnerable record...today's date had that record. Bingo...-9° this morning. So we're starting the day on a historical note. We're not alone either, as the map above showed you. Look at the scope of the cold weather advisories in lighter cyan or extreme cold warnings in darker blue Wind chills this morning are well below 0...20° below locally and colder up north. When you have the extreme cold, it doesn't take much of a breeze to create these types of bitterly cold wind chills. Here is a sampling at 8AM. There are some near 50° below wind chills up towards the Upper Midwest. SE Colorado has a wind chill of -36° at Lamar. This is the coldest we've been since that run of brutal cold last January. We were down to -10° last January 16th. So for sure bitterly cold today. What's happening in the Gulf? All those pinkish counties in the warning map above are winter storm warnings. For some areas down there it's their first time being under this type of warning. Remember that area is not prepared to deal with this stuff. There aren't any road treatments most of that region can put down... so the only way of dealing with it is just to wait and let it melt. There are very few plows available along the I-10 corridor. As a matter of fact most of the interstates are closed in this region Snow totals are going to be in the 2-7" range for most of that region into the SE part of the countries towards the eastern Carolinas. Down towards LA...the 1st ever blizzard warning (in orange) is hoisted for the coastal area. This includes Lake Charles and Cameron as well as elsewhere That's just incredible. Just bizarre. A once-in-a-lifetime storm for the children down there. There may be some downside to those numbers, especially in the New Orleans area where so far there's been just a coating and their experiencing some mixed graupel this morning, cutting those totals. This is mostly snow or some sort of wintry mix. It will spread towards the SW part of the country including northern FL and the eastern Carolinas. Just an incredibly rare type of snow system for this part of the country and something that many haven't seen in a long time. Pretty impressive to see the extent of the arctic air in the US. As a matter of fact, if we look at the world... There's the US, and then there's northern Russia and Siberia that are the coldest relative to average this morning! So for our area...the frigid air mass will start to dislodge later today as south and southwest winds start to take over pushing the air mass away. Winds above us tonight will be close to 50 MPH a couple of thousand feet up...and that will bring in warmer air aloft that should start to mix towards the surface. So after highs today in the mid to upper teens, there may be a bit of a drop off this evening for a couple of hours before temperatures level off and rise toward daybreak tomorrow. There is another chunk of cold air to move into the area later Wednesday night into Thursday. We'll be in the western fringe of this that will take highs down into the mid 20s or so on Thursday before that air mass moves back out on Friday and then we should be in better shape for the weekend, particularly Saturday. It does look like we're going to have another cold front come through later Saturday. That may drop Sunday down a bit, perhaps closer to 30-35° for the tailgaters. That would mean near 30° or so for the game so I'll likely be taking my gameday forecast down about 3-5° tonight. Something else of note...the lack of appreciable moisture. We had the blizzard a couple of weeks ago...but January, while not a moist month to begin with, we average about 1.15" for the month. We're below that now although in a weird thing, our stats for January aren't complete because KCI didn't report a total moisture from the blizzard. So right now the month has only .18" of moisture, although we likely had about 1/2"+ of moisture from the blizzard. Unless that changes, the month will be artificially low for precip totals. The GFS into early February isn't promising for much moisture. This goes through 2/3. The Deep South gets more, we get little to none. The feature photo comes from Alex Pickman. Joe