January Review / February Preview

With the start of a new month, it's time to look back at January.

January High Temperatures

January 2017 was pretty warm, but nothing particularly unusual.

We had 8 days above 5°C, and in the last 20 years that ties for first place with 2014. For total days above 0°C we had 12, which is on the high-side of things, but is below years like 2015, 2014, 2012 and etc. We had no highs below -20°C, and below -15°C we had 4, and that's a little on the low-side.

I've talked before about the reliability of January not-chinooks, and we had two nice ones this year. In the chart above they show up in orange, right at the middle and end of the month.

This is just another perspective of the temperatures over the last few months.

December had fluctuated between very cold and pretty warm. That carried into January, which started out pretty cool, but then warmed way up near the middle of the month. We set one recent record with a high of 7°C on the 29th, and got close to a few in the middle of the month. We didn't set any all-time records though.

Compared to last winter, January 2017 was actually a little warmer than January 2016. But last January was really the only "typical" month last winter, and after that the temperatures took off. We can see that in this chart, with the dotted line for February and March of 2016 being well above the average.

January Low Temperatures

The lows are pretty unexceptional, with the average low of -13°C and 8 days below -20°C putting us right in the middle of the pack.

For the lows we can again see the swing between coldsnaps and warmspells. In January we didn't come close to any recent lows, but we did have 4 warmest-recent-lows during the warmspells. Again though, no all-time records.

Snow

In terms of snow, the International airport recorded just over 10cm, which is about half of the average, and a pretty close match to what we got in November.

February Temperatures

Looking forward to February, we can see that on average about half of the days in the month will break 0°C.

The chances of a coldsnap or two are pretty good, with most years having at least a few lows below -20°C. Highs below -20°C are pretty rare though, with only 3 of the last 20 February's having any days that stayed that cold.

February is also typically the least-snowy winter month, averaging about as much as we just got in January.

3d nerdery

Finally, here's a fun topographical representation of the last 20 years of daytime Highs for January and February. (and to get this to animate cleanly I have to cheat a bit, so this is actually only the first 29 days of January)

I'm going to play around with this more in a few weeks, but just for now, what stands out is the deep canyons of January. Late-December and early-January are when we're most likely to get our deepfreezes, and those show up here as deep, darkblue sections. February isn't much hotter than January is, but it is less extremely-cold, and because of that it's 3d profile is a lot more flat and less variable.