Active January in the Almanor Basin
By Dale Knutsen
Special to Plumas News
If you just go by averages, January in the Lake Almanor basin was not all that exciting. But if you look a bit closer, our weather was definitely not dull.
Total monthly precipitation registered at the Prattville monitoring site was 4.32 inches, a bit less than our long-term average. That brought our July-June seasonal total to 11.38 inches by the end of the month, a figure that is 63 percent of average for this point in the season. However, the west shore received 46.5 inches of snowfall in January (more than an average January), which brought our season total snowfall up to 82 percent of average. Most of that snowfall arrived over a three-day period near the end of the month, keeping residents and snowplow drivers quite busy relocating the white stuff.
January temperatures measured at Chester airport ran slightly warm, with both our average lows and highs coming in nearly 3 degrees warmer than the long-term norm. Still, our mornings were all below freezing, and our extreme low was a bone chilling 2 degrees above zero on the 26th.
