January, a month of two halves
Echo weather expert Phil Morrish looks at the latest statistics
JANUARY was a month of two halves. The first half was mainly dull but dry and on the mild side.
The second half was cooler but with more sunshine and some night frosts. Temperatures balanced themselves out over the month with afternoon maximums logged at 6.9c with night time temperatures registering 1.5c and this included nine night frosts.
Both of these figures were very close to normal and our mean of 4.3c was what you would expect for January.
It was another dry month however with just 26mm of rain falling which is less than half of the usual total.
The total sunshine figure was 50.1 hours in Mountsorrel about 20 per cent below normal.
The month was divided into two halves. The first half was mild, cloudy but mainly dry as a large area of high pressure sat to the south of the UK giving us relatively mild westerly winds.
The mildest day of the month was the 13th when the temperature reached 12c.
The second half of the month was much cooler with a frequent NW wind that gave us some crisp sunny winters days.
One of these on the 28th gave us 8.3 hours of sunshine and the arctic air mass responsible produced our coldest night on the 31st of -5.6c and on that day the temperature only climbed to 2c our chilliest day of the month.
An area of snow moved into the Uk from the south on the 31st but it never reached our area and although we did see six days with snow flakes falling in the month any lying snow was very limited in nature and the snowmen builders and the sledge sellers remain disappointed this winter in Loughborough.
So far the winter has been very kind to us with fairly benign weather. February despite long term predictions of it being colder has actually started on the mild side and it is set to stay so this week but there is still plenty of time for winter to arrive yet!