November's record cold temperatures have had Minnesotans grumbling, but Missouri residents got our cold weather — along with our farm odors.

Kansas City last week was hit by a cloud of stench that weather trackers traced to Minnesota.

In short, Missouri's second-largest city smelled like poop.

The cold front that has Minnesotans digging out their winter coats swept south and took with it the smell of Minnesota pig farms and fields recently treated with manure.

"The front came through Wednesday evening and people noticed the smell that evening," said Pamela Pietrycha a National Weather Service meteorologist in suburban Kansas City.

Early the next morning, meteorologists ran a backward trajectory using an air dispersion model to find out where the odor came from.

The culprit: "We backtracked it to southern Minnesota," Pietrycha said.

The cold air layer was very shallow and winds of 30 to 40 miles per hour pushed it quickly, giving no chance for sweeter smelling layers of air to dilute the smell.

The Twin Cities had a similar experience two years ago, when unseasonably warm late-November weather thawed the soil and sent fertilizer odors wafting throughout the metro area.

Along with fertilizer, "the pig farms, the livestock farms, all that stuff gets lofted into that shallow air mass," Pietrycha said, adding that Iowa probably contributed to the stink, as well.

John Reinan • 612-673-7402