We started the month of January on a rather wintry note with seasonably cold temperatures and strong, blustery winds for the first three days, but now we’re facing a warm spell in the coming days that will mean a bit of a departure from January-like weather for our area.  We’ll have highs in the 30s today and then 40s for Thursday and Friday which will be 20 degrees warmer than average for this time of the year and approaching record territory.  In fact, we’ll almost be forgetting what type of weather we should normally be experiencing this time of the year as abnormally mild weather will be the rule for quite some time.  Here’s a look at the climate averages for this week compared with what we normally see for the end of the month.

January 4th:                                             January 31st:

High: 24                                                      High: 25

Low: 8                                                          Low: 8

Sunrise: 7:44 AM                                    Sunrise: 7:29 AM

Sunset: 4:45 PM                                       Sunset: 5:18 PM

*We’ll gain 48 minutes of daylight at the end of the month compared to today.

*Snowfall: 12.0″  (The old average was 11.9″ before climate statistics were recalculated last summer.)

*The average high for the month is now 23.9, but before the recalculation of the climate averages last summer, it was only 19.9!)

Posted under climate

Thanks to Tuesday’s cold front and a strong area of Canadian high pressure to our north, drier, less humid air is settling into the area today, bringing us more typical weather for early August in our part of the Midwest while the heavy, rich humidity is eing forced southward.  The average high for this time of the year is 80° which now seems realtively cool compared to the warmer than normal conditions we’ve dealt with over the past month or so.  As we wrote about earlier this week, the climate “normals” have changed and August is now a slightly warmer and wetter month than it used to be for Rochester with an overall average high of 78.9° which is about one and a half degrees warmer than the monthly average used to be in the old 30 year average.  The average rainfall has moved up 0.19″ for the city compared to the old data.  Here’s a look at what we can now expect for the rest of the month as we show a side-by-side comparison of today’s averages with the data for the last day of the month.  We’ll be losing more than an hour of daylight in the next four weeks while the temperature will fall off only slightly as we approach Labor Day.

Highs in the 70s will be more common later in a typical August, but overall the temperatures will change very little on average.

Posted under climate