Warm & Dry January
ORIGINAL POST: Monday, February 6, 2012, 1:45 p.m.
2012 is off to a warm and dry start for the Quad Cities and for Illinois.
Officially, at the Quad City International Airport, in Moline, Illinois, temperatures for the month of January 2012 were 6.3° above average. The average high for the month was 38.9° and the average low was 18.8°.
With two-thirds of “meteorological winter”, the three coldest months of the year (December, January, and February), behind us, Illinois is experiencing its 6th warmest winter since 1895.
State Climatologist Jim Angel of the Illinois State Water Survey reports that in January, the statewide average temperature for Illinois were 6.6° above normal and this was the 13th warmest January on record.
Locally, in the Quad Cities we only picked up 0.70″ of precipitation (rain and melted snow) in January, which was 0.79″ below average. However, the Illinois precipitation average for January was 1.87″. The wettest part of the state was eastern Illinois, where Flora reported 4.21″.
Angel reports that “Illinois snowfall last month was generally below normal south of Interstate 74 with amounts in the range of 1 to 3 inches common. Snowfall was above normal north of Interstate 74 with amounts in the range of 3 to 15 inches. The largest monthly snowfall total for the state was at Monee with 17.8″.
In the Quad Cities, we saw 7.6″ of snow accumulate in January, which was 1.8″ below average.
Anthony