FORT WAYNE – Wednesday’s weather started out with a record-high temperature of 64 degrees shortly after 2 a.m., then took a complete U-turn, ending the day with chilly temperatures expected to stick around through the weekend.

“Temperatures are already falling and have been falling throughout the day,” Katie Gross, a forecaster at the National Weather Service in Syracuse, said Wednesday evening. “And they’ll continue falling throughout the night.”

The overnight low early today was expected to be 18.

Across the northern part of the state, today’s temperatures are expected to range from 15 degrees in the west to 22 degrees in the east, she said.

Wednesday’s high shattered the previous record of 55 degrees set in 1988.

And for any Hoosiers dreading more cold weather, keep in mind the lowest temperature on record for Jan. 30 was 8 degrees below zero, set in 1966, Gross said.

Fort Wayne residents should expect the chilly weather to remain throughout the weekend, though there’s not much snow on the radar at this point, Gross said.

“Any rain showers moving through the area will likely change from rain to snow, but there really shouldn’t be too much,” she said. “(Today) and Friday we’ll see some scattered flurries, but again, nothing much.”

With the start of February just around the corner, Gross said Hoosiers in the northeast part of the state have seen only 2.1 inches of snow in 2013.

The average high temperature for the month of January is 36 degrees and the average low is 20.5 degrees, Gross said. Those averages have been tracked since 1980, she said.

jcrothers@jg.net