January a warm winter weather anomaly in parts of state
If you lived through January 2023, you lived through a freak. We probably shall not see its like again.
Due to a combination of factors — a river of moisture that flooded California, a flattened jet stream, locked-in northern cold air that never flowed south — we had an astonishingly warm January in Connecticut, traditionally the coldest month of the year.
And although it was wet, the warmth meant it was largely snowless — about 30 percent to 40 percent less snow than normal.
Even with climate change, it was an anomaly.
“With climate change, we’re talking about 2 or 3 degrees difference,” said Gary Lessor, director of The Weather Center at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury. “In Danbury this year, the January temperatures were 10 degrees warmer than normal for the month.“
Temperatures did crash at the start of February. But they quickly scooted up again.
Lessor said it’s possible the warm pattern will last throughout February as well.
But Bill Jacquemin, chief meteorologist at the Connecticut Weather Center in Danbury, said we could have a cold spring.
“For those of us who love snow, there will be snow,” he said.
Overall, the warmth had its worth.
In a year when heating oil and natural gas was costly, Lessor said, the warm temperatures in January kept a check on heating bills.
Because the ground didn’t freeze solid, the plentiful rain replenished groundwater supplies that had been depleted by last summer’s drought.
And if you want to kill ticks, a warmer-thannormal January, with no snow, followed by a crash from 40 degrees to zero may be an excellent formula for parasitic insect demise.
“It was a very good January for that,” said Gale Ridge, an entomologist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven.
The snowless, barely freezing Connecticut was set up by the atmospheric river that brought an unending series of storms to California last month. That river, in turn, pushed moisture across the Sierras and the Rocky Mountains eastward.
Usually, the jet stream — the high-atmosphere flow of air that runs across North America — develops troughs and ridges that bring cold to New England, along with precipitation.
But Lessor said January’s jet stream ran pretty much west-to-east, without any rise and fall.
“When that air from California got over the mountains, it warmed up,” said Paul Pastelok, senior meteorologist at AccuWeather, a forecasting center in State College, Pa. Because it was so warm, there was no snow. That meant the night air wasn’t cooled by any snow, so the nights stayed relatively warm as well.
The polar air that can flood down into the U.S. mostly stayed bottled up to the north, Pastelok also said. There was one polar plunge in temperatures around Christmas, and a second at the beginning of February. But
“All our monitors show groundwater levels are normal or above normal. We’re looking pretty good.”
John Mullaney, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s New England Water Science Center in East Hartford, about the warm winter helping Connecticut’s drought recovery
there was no prolonged cold snap.
The atmospheric river in California did, however, make its way here.
Matt Spies of Brookfield, regional director of CoCoRaHS — the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow network, which uses volunteers to measure precipitation — said the normal total precipitation in January is about 3 to 4 inches.
Throughout Litchfield County and northern Fairfield County, the January 2023 totals ranged from about 5,5 inches at one station in New Milford to 6.78 inches at another in Newtown. Most were at about 5.8 inches — and very little of it was snow.
“It’s probably the most I’ve seen for January in the CoCoRaHS database,” he said.
John Mullaney, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s New England Water Science Center in East Hartford, said that because January was so warm, the ground did not freeze hard. The heavy rain filled rivers and reservoirs, but it also seeped into aquifers that lost their supplies during the drought that struck in the summer and fall of 2022.
“All our monitors show groundwater levels are normal or above normal,”
Mullaney said. “We’re looking pretty good.”
The warm weather may end up killing ticks.
That may seem counterintuitive, because with the weather so warm, ticks are more active. Ridge said people are finding ticks on their clothing and getting tick bites in higher-than-normal numbers during their winter hikes.
But Ridge said there’s no snow to insulate the ticks. Because they’re now so active — when they’re usually quiet — all the climbing up and down on stalks of grass is depleting their little tick body resources.
Add to that the short, steep cold snap this month, and they’ll be iced.
“They’re more or less likely to be killed,” she said.