The last day of January still didn’t bring a cold snap that would spoil the month’s position as one of the warmest mid-winter months ever in Iowa. State Climatologist Harry Hillaker says if January, 2006 is not the all-time warmest, we came close.

Statewide there were no days this month that averaged below normal, and only in Waterloo on the 21st was there one day that averaged below its local normal temp. Hillaker calls January a “really amazingly consistent month, as far as mild temperatures go. Hillaker, whose office is in the Iowa Department of Agriculture, says when you average the whole state it was also a wet January. Mainly that’s due to some very wet weather last weekend across southeastern Iowa, where as much as two-and-a-half inches of rain fell. While it was very wet in the southeast, it was quite dry across the northwest two-thirds of the state.

Hillaker does see a change comnig in the weather after all this consistency. This mild pattern actually began December 22 and he says we’ve been above normal ever since then. But starting next week, Hillaker says temps will head back downward and might even become cooler than usual. Hillaker notes that a normal February would average about ten degrees cooler than the January we’ve just had.