Are we close to record January warmth? (1-25-12)
With our mild January continuing we started thinking here in the weather office that we had to be close to a record for the month. A search of the records over the last 100 plus years for Syracuse found we are not even close. If the month were to end today we wouldn’t be in the top 5 or even top 10 warmest Januaries on record.Year | Temperature |
1932 | 37.2 F |
1933 | 36.0 F |
1913 | 33.8 F |
2006 | 33.4 F |
1950 | 33.2 F |
1990 | 33.2 F |
2002 | 32.9 F |
1906 | 31.6 F |
1916 | 31.1 F |
1967 | 30.6 F |
1995 | 30.5 F |
2012* | 29.8 F |
This chart was from Tuesday’s run of the GFS ensembles and four of the runs actually showed a storm close to the East Coast with a moderate snowfall possible for us here in central New York. At the time, I mentioned that solution probably only had a low chance of happening since there was no support from the other computer models we look at.Low and behold, today’s GFS ensembles came in and they pretty much squashed the idea of something lurking along the coast. I put arrows next to the individual ensemble members that jumped on the East Coast storm only yesterday. Notice how they are all are much weaker and farther east with any storm system on Saturday.
On top of not showing the coastal storm, the ensembles today actually show more agreement than what we saw yesterday so that gives us greater confidence in our forecast for lighter showers (rain or snow) on Saturday. Those two charts show you how model solutions can change from day to day and when you interpret the data you need to take it with a grain of salt.
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