January Thaw - fact or myth?
FROM TODAY'S PRINT EDITIONS:
Rosi McCloskey, in Stewartstown, Pa., asks: “Is the ‘January thaw’ an actual annual occurrence, or just wishful thinking?”
Maybe both. Stats for the Northeast do show a warm temperature “singularity” around Jan. 20-25. It’s about 6 degrees in Albany, N.Y. But no plausible physical mechanism has been found to explain it.
A Cornell study found the oddity to be “well within the limits of what might be expected to occur by chance alone.” There are other such singularities in the stats, warm and cool. Europeans watch for the “Ice Saints” – a cold spell May 11-14.
(National Severe Storms Laboratory)
Posted by Frank Roylance at 12:01 AM | Permalink
| Comments (4)
Categories: From the Sun's print edition, Sky Notes
Categories: From the Sun's print edition, Sky Notes
Comments
If I recall my history correctly, the date of January 20 was chosen for the Presidential inauguration with the 20th Amendment in 1933 because weather people did a search of weather records, and 'discovered' that there was an increase of 'good weather' on or about January 20.
I wonder how many years of weather history did they research? And was it for the Baltimore/DC area, or for some other spot in the country?
Posted by: Mike | January 23, 2011 2:45 AM
My German mother would never plant annuals until after May 14th because of the "Ice Saints" so I do the same!
Posted by: Marian | January 23, 2011 7:47 AM
They always say that the normal temperature in January is something like 42. Forty two degrees in January feels like a heat wave to me, thirty two seems closer to average. Where do they get these "normal" temperatures. Is it simply the average for the last however many years?
FR: That's the average high in mid-January at BWI, based on the 30-year period from 1971 to 2000. The average will be adusted later this year to the 30-year period from 1981 through 2010.
Posted by: Jeff Powers | January 23, 2011 3:54 PM
Conversely, the all-time record low for BWI of -7F was tied on Jan. 22, 1984, right in the middle of the so-called "thaw" period.
Posted by: Bryan | January 24, 2011 10:58 PM