Nation Was Relatively Cool And Dry In January

The newly-released climate summary for January in the
United States shows we had a dry month for the most part. 
Brown areas are dry, blue is wet. 

 Compared to some months the United States has endured, this January had relatively little weather drama. 

Sure, there were a couple of really big winter storms, more ice than we need and even a few tornadoes to open the month. 

But the way things are in the world and with climate change, it's nice to know we got through a month without a tremendous weather or climate calamity.

All this is to say the final numbers came in for the United States today.  We had a dry month as a whole. And it was a little bit cool, at least by recent standards.

NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information tells us the average temperature for the contiguous United States in January was 31.0 degrees.

To give you a sense of how things have warmed in recent decades, this January was 0.9 degrees warmer than the 20th century average yet still the coldest January in eight years. 

Overall, the United States east of the Mississippi River was generally near or a little cooler than normal, with the coldest relative to normal in parts of the Great Lakes and northern New England. The west was warmish. California was really warm. 

It was a wicked dry January for the nation as a whole. Out of the past 128 years, this January was the 14th driest, which attests to the lack of storminess we've had in the first few weeks of 2022.  There was that Mid-Atlantic snowstorm at the beginning of the month, a nasty snow and rain storm in the Pacific Northwest in early January that led to a bunch of flooding, and big nor'easter in New England toward the close of January, but that was largely it. 

California and Nevada were especially dry in January.  Other areas notably on the dry wide were several spots in the Plains, many areas around the Great Lakes, northern New York and Vermont.  As of the end of the month, 55 percent of the nation was in drought.