January Preview

It's still December, but today we're going to take a look at the type of weather that January might have in store for us.

Normally I do these monthly previews at the same time that I do the reviews for the previous month, but this one is a little early because there will be plenty of year-end stuff to talk about in the next few days.

High Temperatures

Here we have Edmonton's January high temperatures for the last 20 years. With these tables the colours are really the most important part.

Anything in orange is a high above 0°C, and considering that here we're talking about January in Edmonton, that's a fair bit of orange. In the last 20 years the average number of days that broke the freezing mark was 11, which ranged from a low of 4 days to a high of 25. And in the last 10 years the average number of days above 5°C was 5, with 2008 as the only recent year that didn't have any.

And of course we can also see some blues and dark-blues for the cold days. In January we average about 5 days with highs below -15°C, and about 2 days with highs below -20°C.

Looking at the temperature distributions, Edmonton's average high temperature actually bottoms out around Christmas, and during January it's starting to climb back up. The same thing is true for the 25th and 75th percentiles.

That January warming is pretty slow though, and things don't start to really pick up until the start of February. And even though the average high and the quartiles have already turned around, the coldest-of-the-cold days that have been recorded were in late January.

Low Temperatures

Looking at the low temperatures, we don't see very many oranges for lows above freezing - 2013, 2014 and 2015 all had a few of them, but otherwise they've been pretty rare.

Typically most nights are below -10°C, and we average about 8 nights below -20°C and 4 below -25°C.

By January the high temperatures have already started to turn around, and we see something similar for the lows. They're not exactly rocketing back up yet, but they basically flatline from Christmas through about the third week of January. Although again, the coldest-of-the-cold days that have been recorded recently have been at the end of January.