Local meteorologist Scott McKim — the science manager at the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center’s Whiteface Mountain Field Station — said that the various computer weather models that forecasters monitor are showing a consensus for a combination of cold weather and favorable storm tracks over the area.

“I don’t think winter is going anywhere soon,” McKim said.

McKim added a caveat. He said the Tri-Lakes area and the interior Northeast are sandwiched between two very different weather patterns — barely being on the “cold side,” with much warmer air just to our south.

“There is a huge (temperature) gradient north to south,” he said. “Once you go 100 miles south of Albany and the Hudson Valley, things look very different. We’re just on that edge.”

Unlike January, which saw the cold pattern extend much further south, McKim said things are less certain.

“All it takes is a little tweak and maybe that (polar air) lobe kind of retrogrades further north and we do have more of that (warm) southerly flow,” he said. “We’re so close to two very different kinds of weather patterns, but so far it’s looking like the cool side.”

McKim said being so close to the different air masses tends to yield active weather, as storms often track along the boundary.

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Dry January

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This differs from January — which likewise had the cold in place over the area, but lacked any significant storms.

“(January had) a pronounced lack of storms tracking northeastward from the central and southern Rockies that tap into the Gulf of Mexico and western Atlantic moisture,” McKim said. “Consistent with that, we haven’t had a classic nor’easter yet this year.”

McKim added — as is often the case in weather — there was no singular driving factor behind January’s lack of snowfall. One of the contributors, he said, was the jet streams’ behaviors over the Pacific Ocean, which sapped some of the energy from and prevented would-be nor’easters from developing the requisite strength needed to develop into a major storm by the time they made it to the East Coast.

“We’ve had a really strong northeastern Pacific ridge,” he said. “It’s been persistent as kind of been deflecting and preventing the sub-tropical jet (stream) to fuel storms that would reach the West Coast and then track to the East Coast.”

According to meteorological observations gathered at the Adirondack Regional Airport in Lake Clear from National Weather Service equipment, January ended up receiving less than half of its normal amount of precipitation. The airport received 0.78 inches of precipitation — which calculates and measures the liquid equivalent when it falls as snow — compared to a monthly normal of 1.94 inches.

Despite below-average precipitation, the snow that fell did not go anywhere, contributing to a wintry scene.

“We’ve been in this kind of snow globe scenario where it’s been super consistent but super light and we actually have accumulated a bit of snowpack now, especially over the last week or so,” McKim said.

He added that he observed the snowpack to be around 50 inches at Whiteface’s summit. McKim noted that despite a lack of snowfall — this is an above-average snowpack at that location for this point in the season, which he said tends to peak around the beginning of March.

At the airport, temperatures ended up being slightly below average 13.3 degrees compared to 13.6 degrees Fahrenheit, with only three days experiencing high temperatures above freezing, the highest of which only reached 36.

“It’s rare to have a below-average January,” McKim said. “Everyone knows this term now — January Thaw — and we didn’t have that this year. We went the whole month of January without a big thaw.”

In addition to the lack of a pronounced spike in temperatures at any point during the month, one reason January may have felt cold — despite being only slightly below average — was that temperatures were colder in the daytime relative to their averages — when people are more likely to be outdoors — than they were at night, where lows were warmer than average for the month.

The average high temperature at the airport for January was 21.4 degrees Fahrenheit — or 3.5 degrees colder than normal — while the average low temperature was 5.3 degrees Fahrenheit — or 3 degrees warmer than normal. One possible factor for this could be cloudier-than-normal skies, which can act as an insulator — helping to insulate the atmosphere, blunting warming during the day and cooling at night.

Despite a precipitation total amount that was only about 40% of its average, 29 of the 31 days measured at the airport had at least a trace of precipitation, a proxy for how omnipresent the clouds were.