A cold and dry January
It was a very cold month, with an overall temperature that was almost 4 degrees below average. This January was tied with 2014, so you have to go back even further to 2009 to find one that was colder. It might have felt even more frigid as it was close to 6 degrees below last year and 8 degrees colder than the year before. The freezing temperatures were sustained as it didn’t go above zero during the last half of the month.
The low temperature of -32.4°C on the 29th was the second lowest temperature we have ever seen since the UW Weather station was established back in February of 1998. The all-time low was -35.5°C on Feb 16, 2015.
Apart from the one storm that came through on the 17th (more about that later), it was pretty dry for the rest of the month. The final total of 40.6 mm was below the average range.
About that storm on the 17th, it was probably the second or third highest snowfall total since we started measuring daily snowfall at the station in 2001. What makes it difficult to know for sure it that snowfall is only measured once a day, thus the totals for larger storms are often not captured. So although the total for the entire storm was 33.0 cm,
the single day measurement was only 22.5 cm. But this was the highest single day total since March 9, 2005 when we had 31.5 cm.
Although it was a dry month, as the precipitation pretty much all came down as snow, the total snowfall of 51.5 cm was higher than the average of 43.7 cm for the month. This made it the snowiest January since 2013 when we had 54 cm. Overall for the snowfall season we are at 97.0 cm, very close to the average of 95.3 cm for this point in the season.
Summary for January 2022:
Maximum Temperature 3.5°C
Minimum Temperature -32.4°C
Average Daily High Temperature -4.4°C (Long term average -2.6°C)
Average Daily Low Temperature -16.3°C (Long term average -10.3°C)
Total Precipitation 40.6 mm (Long term average 65.2 mm)
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