This January, Our Lows Have Been Typical Wintertime Highs

This tree behind The SunBreak’s office is budding on January 21. Even the resident squirrel looks alarmed. (The squirrel isn’t in this photo, I’m just saying.)

We turn of course to UW meteorologist Cliff Mass. “The warmest January on record was in 2006 when the daily average was 46.6F. So at this rate we are on track to beat it…IF…we stay warm,” he writes on his blog. “We are experiencing April temperatures in mid January … Many of our days have hit highs 5-13 F ABOVE NORMAL, and our minima have generally been higher than the normal maxes.”

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This weekend temperatures may dip toward normal, but next week brings a pineapple express that will re-balm-ify things, and may put this January in the record books.

The El Niño weather pattern has brought an extra helping of rain, in addition to unseasonable warmth. West Seattle is cleaning up from a Beach Drive hillside slide, and out at Hurricane Ridge, a 100-foot section of the road is migrating downhill. A six-week closure is planned, so the Ridge road won’t open again until March.

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You’d think we’d be used to warmer weather in general by now–the numbers are in and the first decade of the new century was the warmest decade on record. The NCDC put average global temperatures 1.01 above normal for 2009 (that “global” is important–in the U.S. the average temperature was up just 0.3 degrees).