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| ...Five dawns later--Let the snows begin! |
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| Dawn of the New Year 2018... |
I've always preferred cold weather to hot weather, and I love it when snow blankets the drab winter brown. So this January's snows and cold have been welcome. They're especially welcome when I recall the freakishly much-too-warm January 2017. In mid-January 2018, NOAA released its assessment of 2017's world-wide temperatures (
NOAA says 2017 was 2nd warmest year on record), and Vox posted an article on the cost of the damage done by aberrant weather events just in this country (
Megadisasters devasted American in 2017: Storms, fires, floods, and heat caused at least $306,000,000,000 in destruction). It's not pretty, especially when you consider that as we begin a new year, we look back on the last 4 years (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017) and see the hottest years worldwide on record. The next hottest years are 2007, 2009, 2010, meaning that seven of the hottest years on record have been in the last ten years.
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| Come into the garden |
As I recorded the daily weather statistics for January at Bean Hill, I noticed that
every day of the month had seen a record high or a record low set since 2014. Extremes in temperatures, as well as wind speeds, precipitation (or lack of it), and monster tornadoes and hurricanes are all part of the climate change picture. The abnormal, as regards weather, is the new normal. Much as I prefer lower temperatures to higher ones, I have to admit that those record-setting cold days this month were too bitterly cold even for me, and I was grateful I didn't have to be anywhere but in a warm house.
At Bean Hill, sixteen new records were set in January. There were eleven days of record-breaking cold, seven of them in the first week of the month. Fortunately our coldest nights were not nearly as cold as two January nights in 2014 that saw the thermometer dip to 22⁰ below zero! Five days saw record high temperatures; every day in January had an all-time high for that date recorded in either 2015, 2016, 2017 or 2018.
Despite the new records set, January was overall delightfully close to "normal". The historic average high for the month is 36⁰ and we came in at 34⁰. The historic average low is 20⁰; our average was 16⁰. Rainfall (thanks to those "warm" days) was .42" more than the historic average of 2.53". And as the pictures illustrate, and quite unlike last year, we had snow. The historic monthly total is 10.5", and we totaled 12.4". (There's a station about 5 miles from us that records daily precipitation and snowfall amounts; I could never be that precise.) By the way, it wasn't until this year that I learned weather trackers regard rain as "precipitation" and snow as, well,...snow. Since we had little to no snow last year, I missed that distinction.
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| Snowy day, showy cardinal |
