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A look back at January

One of the least snowiest January's on record for Columbus, but that wasn't the most noticeable thing about the past month.
January 2020 Climate

Looking back on the month of January, many people are probably happy, but also sad. Sad mainly because of the lack of snow. In fact, we had the third least snowiest January on record with only 0.3" of snow reported. Typically, we average that almost every day in the month of January with a monthly average of 9.2" of snow.

January Climate for Columbus, Ohio

January, however, featured above average precipitation making it in the top 30 for wettest January on record. The wetter than average conditions and lack of snow was thanks to the unseasonably warm month we had. The average temperature was 36.7 degrees, with is officially the 13th warmest January on record. There were only a handful of cool days and a very memorable 71 degree day on the 11th.

Typically we look at temperatures and precipitation to reflect how the past months were, but sometimes it doesn't reflect how the month actually went.

Past rainfall for Columbus in January 2020

We saw 19 days with at least a trace amount of precipitation at the Columbus airport. Take a look a the graphic above. Notice how we saw precipitation on every single Friday, Saturday and Sunday this past month! Not only that, we totaled over 1" of rain for every Friday-Sunday period in January! Talk about a bummer for any outdoor plans over the weekend!

Something also not so "bright" was just how the weather looked. The NWS has different scales to represent the cloud coverage for the day and we only saw 1 day in the month of January that was considered "clear" or sunny. We then had 9 days where the skies featured partly cloudy skies and 21 days with mostly cloudy skies.

January, however, is never a month that we can expect a lot of sunshine thanks to the naturally reoccurring northwest wind that pulls moisture from the Great Lakes and allows for clouds to move over the state during the winter months.

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