January Weather Review In Vermont: Warm, Gloom, And On Occassion Doom

Crows gather in a St. Albans tree last Saturday amid
overcast, dense fog and freezing drizzle. The overcast
and fog persisted all month, keeping especially
nights oddly war in January. 

January has blessedly ended in Vermont, and it's time to go over the receipts.

Usually, when we think of a rough January in Vermont, it involves frequent blasts of bitter Arctic air and tons of snow. 

Neither of which we had in January, 2024. But the extraordinarily persistent overcast, the inability to maintain a snow cover amid frequent thaws and a couple destructive storms thrown in all made the month challenging for Vermonters.

 By at least one measure, January, 2024 was the cloudiest since at least the 1950s, as reported by WPTZ meteorologist Andrew Grautski. He said that 87 percent of the days during the month in Burlington were overcast at noon, compared to an average of 51 percent.

Frequent bouts of fog, drizzle and freezing drizzle made the overcast all the more depressing. 

WARM TEMPERATURES

The month's weather was driven by the ever-present overcast. The clouds kept nights bizarrely warm, since heat couldn't radiate out into space like it does on clear nights.

The clouds also suppressed daytime temperatures. High temperatures for the month were warmer than normal, but not by all that much. 

For instance, the average high in Burlington for January was 32.3 degrees, or 3.4 degrees warmer than the current, climate change driven normal. Normal is based on the average of the years 1990-2020, when things had really started to warm up noticeably.

Meanwhile in Burlington, the average low was 21.6 degrees, which was whopping 8.7 degrees warmer than average.

This all worked out to a January in Burlington that was the 12th warmest on record in data going back to 1902.  (I find a little data missing from the 1880s and 1890s, so I don't use those years in Burlington's record books).

A January in Burlington that never got below zero was once exceedingly rare. Now, it's starting to get more common. We had yet another such January in 2024. 

The only Januaries that stayed above zero in Burlington were in 1906, 1990, 2002, 2016, 2017, 2023 and 2024, 

In those winters, the only ones in which December also stayed above zero were in 2001-02, 2015-16 and 2022-23, and now 2023-24.

The overall pattern of super warm nights and sort of warm days under the grip of our cloudy January held for other parts of Vermont as well. The difference was really shocking in Montpelier. Average January highs were a so-so 3.1 degrees on the warm side, while low temperatures were more than 10 degrees above normal. 

All weather stations that I could see in Vermont had a strongly warmer than normal January, driven by those warm nights.

At least we saved on our heating bills. Heating degree days, a measure of how much fuel might be needed to warm a house or building, are running well below normal. 

PRECIPITATION

All those clouds yielded above normal precipitation in Vermont, but since it was so warm, much of that came down as rain.  

A large tree crashed through the roof of this St. 
Albans house in January 10, one example of the 
widespread destruction from two powerful wind storms
that hit Vermont mid month. 

Burlington's precipitation for January was 3.08 inches, which is nearly an inch more than average. By my reckoning it was the 16th wettest January in Burlington, with records beginning around 1900.

Everyone else in Vermont had a January solidly on the wet side. Rutland was especially soggy, with 4.09 inches of precipitation, nearly an inch and a half on the wet side.

This might surprise you, but snowfall in Vermont was actually very close to average.

 Burlington was only about an inch on the light side with 19.9 inches for the month. Rutland and St. Johnsbury were actually a couple inches on the snowier than normal side. 

But all that warm air kept melting the snow. Snow cover in Burlington was only at or above five inches on five days. St. Johnsbury's snow cover never amounted to more than nine inches, despite the 23.5 inches of snow that fell there in January. 

STORMS

There were really only two big storms in January, as the rest of the inclement weather was pretty modest. But those two storms were doozies.

They came back to back on January 10 and 13. Both storms packed very damaging winds, with gusts exceeding hurricane force in some spots.  The state is still recovering from widespread tree and structural damage.

Several homes suffered serious damage in St. Albans on January 10 when trees fell on them. Roofs were blown off structures in and near Cambridge. 

The storm on January 13 ripped the roof off a Richmond home, caused other structural damage across the state and cut power to thousands.

OUTLOOK:

As always, I don't put a huge amount of faith in long range forecast. But those forecasts point to at least the first half of February lacking the drama that January brought to Vermont.  

The storm track looks like it wants to stay mostly suppressed to the south and east of Vermont. If those trends continue - a big if - we might have our first decidedly dry month in quiet since last spring. Time will tell on that one. 

Those long range forecasts also hint at near normal to above normal temperature into the middle of the month. After that, the forecast gets really murky.  Do note that in winters with El Nino, we often, but not always have the harshest winter weather of the season arrive in late February and March. 

Not sure if that will be the case this year, but that's the only hope I have if you love old fashioned Vermont winters.