News - Blogs - January 2012 to August 2001 The month that could have been

January 2012 to August 2001: The month that could have been
Published: 1/31/2012 5:00 AM
Last Modified: 1/30/2012 6:26 PM

It's not easy being green... or blue. This map by the Oklahoma Mesonet shows January's rainfall statewide. Note Tulsa County not receiving as much as southeast or central Oklahoma.

My eyes got wider as I started to look through Tulsa's all-time weather records.

Driest month in more than a decade?

The date was Jan. 18. We were having the coldest day of the month (17 degrees) and were just a few days removed from MLK Day, the warmest day of the month (72 degrees). There were no records being set, despite our atypical warmth and atypical dry spell.

Blogging on the weather and providing web forecast updates regularly, I'm always on the lookout for weather-related stories for our print audience. Next to Tulsa setting a weather record, a weather milestone like this was also something worth telling the editors about.

The National Weather Service keeps track of all-time records for Tulsa for various categories, and one of those is liquid precipitation. You can check out the records here.

After pouring over months going on years of records, I finally found the number I was looking for: Anything less than 0.02 of an inch.

It was August 2001.

Here's the connection: By that time in January, Tulsa had only had 0.02 of an inch of liquid precipitation (local meteorologists repeatedly told me that it was not rain, but rather, melted snow from the 0.5 of an inch we had received earlier that month).

This was the lowest amount of liquid precipitation recorded in any month in Tulsa since August 2001, when Tulsa received 0.01 of an inch.

Now, I assume that August 2001 wouldn't have gotten snow that melted into liquid precipitation, so if you were to get really technical and look for a month with no rain (as of that day), you'd have to go even further back in the record book, to January 1986.

With little hope of any rain or other precipitation in sight, at that point in the month, we were looking at one of the driest months on record.

Precipitation takes the milestone possibility away

It wasn't meant to be, however, and what a difference a little bit of rain makes as far as records and milestones go.

On Jan. 24-25, Tulsa received 0.59 of an inch of liquid precipitation. The storm that hit most of the state (except the Panhandle) brought Tulsa's month's total up from 0.02 of an inch to 0.61 of an inch.

And like that, our month's ranking went from third-driest January of all-time all the way down to 24th-driest January of all time, right behind last year's 0.57 of an inch.

Tulsa's January was dry, because Tulsa Januarys are dry

How could so little precipitation make such a big difference in monthly rankings? January is the driest month of the year in Tulsa. Its normal rainfall for the month is 1.66 inches. Here is how each month's normal stacks up against each other:

January: 1.66
February: 1.85 (or 1.93 for a leap year)
March: 3.29
April: 3.79
May: 5.87
June: 4.72
July: 3.36
August: 2.9
September: 4.26
October: 3.93
November: 2.81
December: 2.49

On one hand, the story in Tuesday's edition is not about a weather milestone. It was simply a drier-than-usual month during the driest month of the year in Tulsa.

On the other hand, Oklahoma as whole has been in the midst of a drought for about a year now. This was a milestone that nobody should be sad that Tulsa isn't setting.

--Althea Peterson

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Almanac

Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun
Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec

	Temperature		Precipitation
Date	High Temp	Low Temp	Total	Month to date	Historical average
1	44°	16°	0	0.00	0.05
2	59°	24°	0	0.00	0.11
3	57°	33°	0	0.00	0.16
4	68°	37°	Trace	0.00	0.21
5	69°	29°	0	0.00	0.26
6	66°	33°	0	0.00	0.32
7	59°	38°	0.05	0.05	0.38
8	51°	34°	0	0.05	0.44
9	44°	36°	0.01	0.06	0.51
10	62°	37°	0.07	0.13	0.57
11	54°	28°	0	0.13	0.64
12	44°	30°	0.25	0.38	0.70
13	55°	40°	0.01	0.39	0.76
14	°	°			0.83
15	°	°			0.89
16	°	°			0.95
17	°	°			1.02
18	°	°			1.09
19	°	°			1.16
20	°	°			1.23
21	°	°			1.31
22	°	°			1.38
23	°	°			1.46
24	°	°			1.53
25	°	°			1.61
26	°	°			1.69
27	°	°			1.77
28	°	°			1.85

TEMPERATURE

RAINFALL

SNOWFALL

Weather World

Follow Jerry Wofford on Twitter for updates during severe weather conditions.

Tulsa weather milestones of 2013 (as of Feb. 12)

Highest temperature: 70 on Jan. 11 (Record: 115 on Aug. 15, 1936)
Lowest temperature: 15 on Jan. 16 (Record: Minus-16 on Jan. 22, 1930)
Hottest month (average): 40.5 degrees in January (Record: 91.7 degrees on July 1980)
Coldest month (average): 40. 5 degrees in January (Record: 21.7 in January 1918)
Most snowfall (day): 0.1 of an inch on Feb. 12(Record: 13.2 inches on Feb. 1, 2011)
Most snowfall (month): 0.1 of an inch in February(Record: 22.5 inches in February 2011)
Most rainfall (day): 0.91 of an inch on Jan. 29 (Record: 9.27 inches on May 26-27, 1984)
Most rainfall (month): 1.54 of an inch in January (Record: 18.18 inches on September 1971)
Highest wind speed: 30 mph on Jan. 30
Previous day with any rain: Feb. 12
Previous day with 1 inch or more of rain: Oct. 17, 2012
Previous day with any snow: Feb. 12
Previous day with freezing temperatures: Feb. 12
Read regular updates on Oklahoma's unpredictable weather and learn more about meteorology from the Tulsa office of the National Weather Service.

>> Visit the main weather page
>> Send us your weather photos
>> Meet the forecasters

Contributors
Staff Writer Althea Peterson started writing for the Tulsa World in March 2007 after previous stops at the Norman Transcript in 2006 and the Oklahoma Gazette in 2005. She followed her older brother from rural Wisconsin (with a public school that never seemed to call snow days) to the University of Oklahoma, but did not follow his pursuit to study meteorology. However, she tries to find as many opportunities to report on the weather as possible.

Staff Writer Jerry Wofford came to the Tulsa World in 2010 from The Manhattan Mercury in Manhattan, Kan. Originally from western Arkansas and a graduate of the University of Oklahoma, Jerry has lived in Tornado Alley his entire life and is one of those people who goes outside when the sirens go off.

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