January was quite the roller coaster ride around my area as we dropped down below zero for days. Then we climbed up to record highs to end the month. This is a case where average daily temperatures are really misleading.
Officially, at Lawrence Airport, the daily average was 25.4 degrees F for the month. This is below normal cold weather and there was one record low temperature on the 16th. Had the pattern stayed the same this would have been one of the top coldest months on record. But the last week of January set two record highs and was a pretty warm week. That continues into February, it was 71 today, likely a new record high!
02.03 Edit: yes the first two days of February 2024 were both the warmest high on record and the warmest low on record.
Below are two graphs for January 2024, the highs and lows. Do note this is temperature data from the NWS Lawrence Airport station:
Both graphs generated with gnuplot, was interesting to generate since it had been a few years since I used the program. Very powerful if you know what you are doing (I don’t).