The daily weather log

The month began sunny and dry, but two degrees cooler than usual. Three rainy days beginning on the fifth brought high humidity and one daily maximum temperature as low as 24.4°. This is 9.2° below normal! Eight fine days followed, with normal January temperatures.

With a second rainy spell from the 17th to the 21st, days were again remarkably cool: five days were more than 8° below normal. In the dry fine weather that followed, all temperatures – maximum, minimum, and mean – were even lower than when the month began. They slowly rose to normal by the end of the month.
Humidity was normal for January: the morning Dew Point was 10° to 12° in the dry spells and 18° in wet spells, giving an average of 14.2°.
Rain fell on nine days. The wettest day, the 17th, had 17.2 mm, and the total was 65.8 mm.

 Comparing January months

This January had the coolest days in nine years, and the second coolest mean temperature. This month’s mean daily maximum (31.0°) was 2.9° below the nine-year average (33.9°), and an astonishing 4.4° below last year’s figure (35.4°). Because the mean maximum was low and the mean minimum was not, the mean daily temperature range this month (13.7°) was also low.

Using Dew Point to measure humidity, January and February are Manilla’s most humid months. This month’s mean morning Dew Point of 15.3° is normal.

With 39% of mornings having more than 4 octas of cloud, this was a cloudy month, but not as cloudy as December (58%) or November (50%).
The total monthly rainfall of 65.8 mm is 21 mm short of the long-term January average. However, total rainfalls for the last 2, 3, and 4 months are all above the 80th percentile.

Data. Rainfall data is from Manilla Post Office, courtesy of Phil Pinch. Dew point values before August 2005 are from Tamworth Airport 6 am data supplied by the Bureau of Meteorology. Temperature and other data are from 3 Monash Street, Manilla.