January gave us a touch of winter, with some snow for a while. Snow is not recorded well by automatic weather stations, as it doesn’t feed neatly into the rain gauge. So it was with ours, and an ongoing problem with our rain gauge resulted in no further recordings in January. However, a weather station nearby in Loughton recorded 111.0mm from 21 rainy (and snowy) days in January, and a day max of 18.0mm on 27th. Our rain record was surely very similar, which would place this January as the third wettest in our 42 years of records.

You can see the chilly start to the month clearly in the temperature charts. January started with six successive nights of frost, the lowest temperature being -5.3°C on the 6th; overall there were nine days with a frost. But there were no ‘ice days’ – the lowest day maximum recorded was 1.8°C on the 10th. In fact the mean temperature for the month overall was slightly above our long term average at 4.5°C.

The reason for the chilly start was the flow of northerly winds, clearly shown in the daily most common wind direction charts.

Even after the first ten days, the winds were stuck in a south-easterly direction, which gave the occasionally cool and often wet conditions. These were due to a blocking high pressure over Scandinavia, forcing Atlantic depressions further south, so that we were usually on their northern edge.

The pressure chart also shows how we were stuck with passing depressions to our south, the average pressure for the month being 1002.2mb, the lowest January figure in our 14 years of comparable records – indeed, the second lowest for any month after November 2009.

But it meant a lack of the usual January gales: the strongest recorded gust in the month was 28mph (Force 6) on 27th, the lowest January wind speed maximum in our records.

And finally the sun: yes, it was spotted this January! There were 16 days on which the sun shone, and the total sunshine hours for the month was just 31.4 – comfortably the lowest January figure in the three years we’ve been recording this.

Will the weather patterns stay the same all the way through February? We will have the answer here!

Measure	Unit	Minimum	Average	Maximum	Average min	Average max	Total
Relative humidity	%	66	90	97
Temperature	°C	-5.3	4.5	10.3	2.1	7.1
Wind source (most common/highest gust)	Sector		N	E
Wind speed	mph		3.7	28		18.0
Rain daily accumulation	mm		0.4	9.6			13.4
Barometric pressure	hPa	976.5	1002.2	1021.6
Solar irradiance during daylight	W/m² kWh/m²		68	429		206	17.9
Sunshine (according to University of California formula)	Hours		1.0	3.6			31.4