The dramatic temperature fluctuations in Arkansas over the past few days are nothing to sneeze at.
"Shifts in temperature don't actually make us ill," said Carrie Brown, a pediatrician with Arkansas Children's Hospital in Little Rock.
Brown said cold air might cause a nose to run, but that doesn't mean an illness is setting in.
"It's just your body reacting to the air," she said. "You get sick typically from viral illnesses that are airborne, spread from other people."
From low temperatures around zero on Saturday, much of Arkansas will see highs around 70 degrees on Wednesday, according to National Weather Service forecasts.
Fayetteville will go from minus 1 degree Saturday to about 68 degrees Wednesday, while Little Rock's temperature is expected to jump from 12 degrees to 70 during that time.
Today, the high should be about 64 degrees in both cities. Along with warmer temperatures, rain will spread across the state, at least periodically, for the rest of the week.
While the recent temperature swings may seem dramatic, they are nowhere near the records, according to the National Weather Service.
On Nov. 11, 1911, the temperature in Fayetteville dropped by 72 degrees in eight hours, said Pete Snyder, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Tulsa. It was a balmy 81 degrees in Fayetteville at 3 p.m. that day. By 11 p.m., the temperature had dropped to 9 degrees, Snyder said.
In Little Rock, the record for 24-hour temperature change was set Jan. 19, 1985, when it plummeted from 60 degrees that afternoon to minus 2 degrees the next morning, said Brian Smith, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in North Little Rock.
"This is winter in Arkansas," Smith said. "We have pretty significant temperature swings."
The changes over the past few days just haven't been as dramatic, especially over any given 24-hour period, said Smith. The most dramatic recent 24-hour temperature changes were Little Rock's jump from 20 degrees to a high of 46 on Monday and Fayetteville's increase from minus 1 to 30 degrees on Saturday.
Temperatures in Jonesboro, Walnut Ridge and West Memphis bottomed out at 10 degrees over the weekend, said Marlene Mickelson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Memphis. Those eastern Arkansas cities also should see highs around 70 degrees on Wednesday or Thursday.
Snyder said cold dry air from the Rocky Mountains would compress and heat up as it flows over Arkansas this week. At the same time, moisture will blow this way from the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.
With increased chances of rain Thursday night, temperatures will be lower Friday, with Fayetteville expecting a high of 46 degrees, Little Rock 52 degrees and Jonesboro 45 degrees.
"We don't see it getting too much colder through the weekend," Snyder said. "After that, we see a pattern where we don't see these big surges of arctic air like we have been seeing. Our pattern will begin to even out a bit."
As the winter storm moved across a broad swath of the state Friday, at least four people died in crashes on Arkansas roads. The four were:
• Otis D. Love, 46, of Memphis, who lost control of his 2001 Ford F-150 pickup on a snowy Interstate 40 bridge in St. Francis County, hitting two bridge barriers before colliding with a tractor-trailer rig.
• Daniel Wayne Blair, 49, of Benton, whose 1999 Ford hit an ice patch on Interstate 30 in Saline County and then struck a concrete barrier.
• Amanda Sue McKinnon, 40, of Damascus, whose 2006 Dodge slid into the southbound lane of snow-covered U.S. 65 at Bee Branch in Van Buren County and was hit by a semi-truck, killing McKinnon and a child in the vehicle.
Information for this article was contributed by Gavin Lesnick and Eric Besson of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Metro on 01/10/2017