DOT camera from January 17.
State climatologist Justin Glissan says above normal precipitation and temperatures defined the weather for January.
“The statewide average temperature was 22.8 degrees — and that’s about 3.4 degrees above average,” according to Glissan. “If we’re looking at precipitation, preliminarily we are at about an inch-and-a-half across the state — and that’s just over half-an-inch above normal. Now if we consider snowfall across the state — the average was 11 inches — and that’s just about three inches above average.”
Glissan says much of the month was a bit of the gloomy side with numerous consecutive days of cloudy weather. “We had a lot of cloudy days. We were stuck in a stagnant weather pattern — especially the last half of the month, where we had a lot of fog, a lot of overcast skies. And this can be attributed to the snowpack that we had across the state, and we had some warmer air masses moving across that snowpack, so we had a proclivity to have more fog and cloudy conditions,” Glissan says.
Glisan says there’s not a true picture right now on how warm or cold February might be. “We’re not getting a very good signal in terms of temperature — it’s was we call E-C or equal chance for above or below or near average temperatures,” Glissan says. He says there is a slightly better indication on the precipitation for the month.
“We look at precipitation for the month — we have a slight signal for below-average wetness in the southern part of the state and then again this E-C in the rest of the state,” Glissan says. Glissan says in the short term that is slightly wetter than average outlook for the start of February.
(By Pat Powers, KQWC, Webster City)