The city of Minneapolis saw an 81-degree swing between Valentine's Day and Tuesday, meteorologists say. 

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March 10 -- You'll have to excuse the residents of Minnesota if they don't know exactly what clothes to wear these days.

Within the span of just a few weeks, Minneapolis has experienced low temperatures that challenged a daily record low set almost 150 years ago -- and now has broken a daily temperature record that stood for 142 years.

On Feb. 14, temperatures dipped all the way down to -19 degrees Fahrenheit at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, just missing a record low temperature for the date set in 1875.

Now, just three weeks later, residents are dressing for a very different record. On Tuesday, the city reached a high of 62 degrees, shattering the previous record high (61 F) set in 1879.


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"We've got a system going up to our west, putting us in the warm part of the system [on Tuesday] with strong southerly winds really pumping in the warmth," Chris O'Brien, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Minneapolis, told AccuWeather.

The system has baked the central United States since last weekend, sending temperatures across the northern Plains and Midwest 15 to 30 degrees above normal for this time of the year.

By Tuesday afternoon, daily records were already broken in Chicago, Duluth, Minn., Green Bay, Wis., Wausau, Wis., and Sioux Falls, S.D. On Monday, records were broken farther west, including a high of 65 in Mobridge, S.D., breaking a 110-year-old record for the date. North Platte, Neb., broke a record from 1936 by 4 degrees on Tuesday.


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"The driving force behind the warm blast has been a pronounced northward bulge in the jet stream," AccuWeather Meteorologist Mary Gilbert wrote. "As this bulge builds farther northward and eastward each day through the middle of the week, it will allow unseasonably warm air to spread across much of the Central and Eastern states."

After heating up the central region, the surging heat is expected to be welcomed by residents in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast.

Following the record warmth, conditions have begun to take an unsettled turn as a storm system sweeps through the region and cold air presses southward from the Canadian Prairies and into the northern Plains.

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This is the first of a pair of storms that will hit the central United States over the next week -- with a bigger, more significant storm set to unfold over the weekend.