THE post-Christmas fortnight is one of the most reliable stormy spells in the year. It was therefore quite remarkable that the very settled, frosty weather enjoyed over the Christmas period should continue into the New Year. In fact, it was the sunniest start to a year since 2012. Who would have imagined how the month of January would end!

New Year’s Day greeted us with frozen ground and sunny spells, the next few days giving much more sunshine but falling temperatures. Monday, January 5, was a “classic” winter’s day, with a slight dusting of snow in Wellington, unbroken sunshine and a maximum temperature of just 3⁰C (37⁰F). In the second week, only Thursday, January 8, did not offer us sunshine. That day saw the barometric pressure plunge as a storm, named “Goretti” by the French weather bureau, tracked along the English Channel. There was a spell of heavy rain on a strengthening south-easter, which switched to become a north-wester overnight, with gale force gusts.

For the remainder of the month, conditions would remain unsettled. After a couple of quite sunny days, Sunday, January 11 was dull with some bursts of heavy rain in the afternoon. It was the warmest day of the month, with a maximum temperature of 12⁰C (54⁰F) in Wellington, the following two days also being quite mild but also damp. There was then a short spell with night frosts and plenty of sunshine before Sunday, January 18, marked the start of a most extraordinary period of persistently dull, wet weather.

With a large block of very cold air having developed over continental Europe, weather systems approaching us from the Atlantic were prevented from continuing along their normal eastward route. Instead, time and again, they would stall over the south-west quadrant of the British Isles, with belts of heavy rain either stationary or moving only slowly across our region. 31mm (1.2 inches) of rain in Wellington on Tuesday, January 20, was unusual, with more than 80mm (3.2 inches) over the next four days.

Flooding was by now widespread and quite serious. With a depression named Storm “Chandra” by the Met Office approaching from the south-west, further rain set in after dark on Monday, January 26. This amounted to 41mm (1.6 inches) in the Wellington rain gauge next morning, being our largest-ever January “daily” fall, and bringing the seven-day total to 158mm (6.2 inches) – also a record. The River Tone reached levels that had not been seen for many years.

Rain on each of the last five days took the final total to a whopping 264mm (10.4 inches), by far the highest total for any month on record in this area. To provide context, that is more than 25 per cent of the rain we get in an average year. (UK Met Office regional data suggest that December 1934 may have been wetter.) January’s mean temperature of 4.8⁰C (40.6⁰F) was exactly average, as were total hours of sunshine.

Simon Ratsey, Wellington Weekly News weather correspondent