After a chilly start to Wednesday, temperatures soared during the afternoon hours thanks to a brisk southwesterly wind mixing down warmer air from aloft. A few locations in the state were able to add 40+ degrees to the low temperature for an afternoon high. For example, Waterloo had a low of -1 and a high of 40, which makes for a 41 degree warm-up. Such large differences in the daily low and high temperature are a bit rare for January as shown by the featured chart. The left panel presents a histogram of daily temperature combinations during January and the right side of the plot shows some statistics on the daily temperature range. A 41 degree warm-up comes in at the 99.25th percentile, which works out to a return interval of about one day over three years worth of Januarys.

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Tags:   jan