Everybody in New England – by which I mean me and people I know – has heard of the “January thaw”. This is the expectation that during the middle of this month, temperatures will rise above freezing long enough that skiers will get grumpy and everybody else will notice.

But is this a real thing or just a case of confirmation bias – remembering times that support our belief and forgetting the rest?

The Mount Washington Observatory wondered about this, too, so they crunched the weather data and found that it pretty much exists. Click through to their website to see the more nuanced details.

(Incidentally, we’re talking about long-term patterns, not the recent climate-changed world. These days, every week seems to have a January thaw.)

 

 

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