After a very wet January, February ushered in a sudden and welcome change with two weeks of generally dry weather. Of course, the penalty for calm weather in winter is either fog or frost, and we had a taste of both during the first half of the month. In fact, the cold weather was a feature of the month, with the majority of days colder than average, and figures overall for the month a full 1° cooler than expected for Blackburn
*.
The dry spell at the start of the month also contributed to a lower rainfall figure than usual, our figure of 48.6mm being 19% less than the rainfall of a typical Blackburn February
*. Even so, our rain gauge still got wet on 14 days, exactly half of the total number of days in the month, which might not sound too impressive, but to us Blackburnians that's pretty good going!
February is normally when we would expect some snow, but, aside from a few flakes near the end of the month (which counts as a 'snow day' even though it didn't hang around), we managed to avoid a white-out. A typical Blackburn February has around 3 days when snow falls, so the one day we recorded was another good result.
I don't have any historical figures to compare for wind speeds, but one interesting statistic produced by the weather station is the 'wind run', the combined distance travelled by the wind based on the continuous speed measurements taken by the station. In February this was just below 3,300 miles, which compares very favourably with January (almost 5,300 miles) and December 2014 (4,550 miles).
So all in all, February passes all the tests, and even bucks the global warming trend too! Let's hope the weather continues its good nature into spring, which is now just around the corner.
* Oakdale weather station average compared to historical data obtained from weatherbase.com.
