What a January!

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 31/01/2012 (5022 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I had a couple of minutes this morning and thought I would take a look at just how warm it’s been this January.

It seems like every day has been above normal — and not just a little bit above normal, but melty and rainy.

Sure, most years we get some sort of January or February melt, but this is pretty ridiculous. Luckily, I found a way to graph precisely how ridiculous it is, over on the Environment Canada site:

The top line, in magenta, shows the warmest temperature it’s ever been on any particular January day. You’ll notice that three of those records were set this year (on Jan. 5, 9 and 25).

Interestingly, that doesn’t even come close to making us the most record-setting year. In fact, six of those record-setting temperatures date all the way back to 1942, and another five of them date back to 1944.

But following the red line of this year’s daily high temperatures also shows just how far above normal we have consistently been. I can only count six days this pat month where we have been unseasonably cold. (I remember that week, though I don’t want to.)

Similarly, the overnight low just hasn’t been that low.

We haven’t even come close to setting an all-time cold record — in fact, we’ve regularly been 40 or more degrees warmer than the all-time cold record, which is frankly astounding to me. And the closest we’ve come looks like it was still about 10 degrees away.

Similarly, I can only count five days when we were hitting below-seasonal temperatures at our overnight low, athough there are an additional four days that were close.

Now that we’re heading into February when, believe it or not, the trend is to start warming up, I’m curious to see if we get a final (first?) whallop of winter, or if we’ll have a very early spring.

One of the factors that might determine that is our severe lack of snow. Did you know that Westman is in a moderate drought condition? That’s how little precipitation we’ve had. And what little snow we have had isn’t sticking around, thanks to mild, melty temperatures.

Snow, being white, tends to reflect sunlight back upwards, so I would guess that, as it melts out of the way faster than normal, the ground might warm up earlier in the year, and we’d be in for an early spring.

Alternatively, though, snow is also an insulator, so there’s the possibility that the ground might be colder than it would normally be, and would take even longer to warm up. However, perhaps our string of very warm days has more than compensated for that.

Either way, I sure picked the wrong year to get back into cross-country skiing.