January saw a general continuation of the unsettled conditions that have prevailed since late October.

We cannot expect to record such a positive anomaly with regard to temperature such as occurred in December. In fact, New Year’s Day dawned with a light air frost. Thereafter, the day turned wet and was followed by nine more generally mild and damp days. However, the wind direction swung to north of west for three days, allowing some sunny intervals to develop, and there was another light frost on the morning of the 8th.

The period from the 11th-20th was colder generally. The airstream remained more consistently from the Northwest, allowing sunnier days, clearer nights, less rain, and several frosts. The hardest of these occurred on the 20th with the month’s lowest temperature of -4.0C.

The final ten days ushered in another mild and wet spell. The 21st gave us 27.9mm of rain, and this was followed the next day by the month’s highest temperature of 15.3C. One more frost occurred on the morning of the 28th the day that Gilly and I set off for a week in the Canary Islands. I am  most grateful to Ann for taking the readings in our absence.

Overall, the month was slightly milder than January 2015, with a mean figure of 6.75C and was the mildest since 2008. It was also the fifth successive January to record above average temperatures.

Rainfall made its presence felt with recordable totals being made on 26 days; only three days were completely dry. This means that since October 23rd only eight days (out of 101) have recorded no rainfall. In general the first half of the month was wetter than the second half, but the total of 159.9mm is significantly higher than one might reasonably expect.  However, despite distinct parallels with the winter of 2013-2014, the month’s total was only 55% of the January 2014 total.

Peter at Pottlelake