This was the coldest January ever! (Spoiler: no)

If you’ve been bragging to far-away friends about how you’ve just survived one of the coldest Januarys ever, you should stop bragging.

According to the knowledgeable folks at the National Weather Service office in Gray, Maine, which covers most of New Hampshire, the average temperature in Concord over this past January was 20.3 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s not warm – it’s 2.0 degrees below the average January – but it was only the 64th coldest January in the past 158 years.

Not exactly a record.

OK, you say, even if the average wasn’t super-cold surely the number of cold days in a row was special? It feels like it’s been below freezing since Christmas.

Sorry, no.

Meteorologist Derek Schroeter did a search and we didn’t even show up in the list of longest runs of below-freezing days. The record was 37 in a row in 1977, with the only recent year in the top 25 being 2003, with 22 below-freezing days in a row.

“Most of those years are in the past century,” Schroeter noted.

And that is probably part of the issue. Last winter was pretty cold, but the five winters before that were all well above normal for average temperatures and days above freezing.

“People have probably gotten used to warm winters at beginning of the decade” making this winter feel more brutal than the numbers say, Schroeter said.

There’s one other figure to be aware of: Precipitation.

It feels like we’ve had a lot of snow because it hasn’t melted, but actually we only received a total of 2.39 inches of precipitation in January (in other words, if you melt the snow that has fallen it turns into 2.39 inches of water). That is a full 0.41 inches below normal.

Since we entered winter with most of the state classified as “abnormally dry” or in the earliest stages of official drought, that’s not good. If we don’t have a wet spring, be prepared for dry wells and wildfires.