Wednesday Grooming, Cupid Cup, and January Weather Report

Grooming

Randy just texted that he's groomed everything except the Cow Pasture. Thank you, Randy! The long-term forecast looks like winter isn't leaving anytime soon. Enjoy the snow!

Cupid Cup

Just a reminder that you and all your friends & family are invited to join the Cupid Cup on Saturday. Check the Cupid Cup tab up top on the home page for more information. The main course will be closed for the race until around 11am, but there will still be skiing at the Cow Pasture.

January Weather

Also, in case anyone is interested, here's Lee Warnick's January Rexburg Weather re-cap:

Rexburg Temperatures

High temperatures: 30.5 / 2.5 degrees above normal

Low temperatures: 17.0 / 6.1 degrees above normal

Zero or below days: 1     Normal: 6.4

Highest wind gust: 40 mph on the 14th

Number of windy days: 7    Normal: 3.5

Highest temperature: 39 on the 21st

Lowest temperature: -7 on the 10th

Lowest wind chill: -9 on the 15th

     • We saw mildish max temps in January -- highs each day ranged only between 22 and 39, with about half of the days within a few degrees of freezing. No great cold snaps this month.

     • Once more, the most prominent temp feature was the really mild average low temperatures. Our single subzero day was sandwiched between ones with lows around 20. The bounteous cloud-cover was largely the reason: We had cloudy skies for the final 12 days of the month, meaning that not only were we given only rare glimpses of sun, it also meant an insulating blanket, and higher low temps, on most nights.

     • January was snowy -- more about that to come. The first round of storminess brought us classic Pacific winter systems with temps generally in the 20s, and all snow of the typical Rexburg winter dryish variety. The final-week storminess was more like a Pineapple Express, with temps in the 30s and some rain, or occasionally frozen rain, mixed in with the much wetter snow. 

Rexburg Precipitation

Precipitation: 2.16 / 208 percent of average

   Notes: Breaks January monthly record of 1.85 from 1982

Snowfall: 26.7 / 184 percent of average

   Notes: 2nd most January snow in 49 years, second only to 26.8 in 1982

2019-20 water year precipitation (4 of 12 months): 4.02 / 96 percent of average

2019-20 season snowfall: 51.6 / 128 percent of average

     • Yep, this was our all-time wettest January, easily so, and it was almost the snowiest one ever. (It also could have been a record-breaker -- snowfall measurement is tricky, and when in doubt I tend toward the conservative. It's safe to say this January ranks right there with the epochal winters of the early 1980s.) 

     • This month featured two half-inch precip days (we'd only seen seven of these in the previous 48 Januarys). The month (as well as year and decade) began with one of the Top 3 snowstorms of all time, a monster system that registered 0.60 precip / 8.5 inches. Things quieted down for the next several days to give us time to dig out, and then a week-long series of generally light storms added 0.34 precip / 6.5 inches. After another quiet week, the month ended with a week of wet storms that occasionally mixed in rain with the snow. This final week registered an impressive 1.19 precip (by itself more than the January average) / 11 inches (a lot, but relatively light for that much precip). Of such are record-breaking months built!

     • I've been taking daily snow cover readings (admittedly another quirky stat) since January 1997, and 19 inches is right up there with the deepest January 31 snow cover I've seen since then. However, I do remember measuring somewhere around a thigh-deep 38 inches in the open area to the north of my former Spori Building office sometime before that (we moved to Rexburg in 1988). I don't recall when this was, so it may have to qualify as urban legend until I can confirm when this happened.

     • Our water year has rebounded very nicely: We rocketed from 59 to 96 percent of normal in a single month!