DETROIT – The books are now closed on 2018, so it’s time to look back at our year of weather, and there was a lot of noteworthy weather that caught our attention.
First of all, we ended up as Detroit’s fourth wettest year on record. Remember, that this is the combined rainfall and melted liquid equivalent of snow that fell.
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If you thought it was a wet year, you were right. We received more than 30 percent above our long-term average rainfall in 2018.
On a monthly scale, three of our 12 months were quite noteworthy.
May finished as the second-warmest and fifth-wettest May on record, while September was close behind as the fifth-warmest and fourth-wettest September on record.
Then there was December, the official start of meteorological winter, yet there was a dearth of true winter weather. The one-half inch of total snow officially measured at Metro Airport made it the fourth-least-snowy December on record.
On the daily scale, one day stands out among the rest: Feb. 20, 2018. That day, for the first time that I can remember in my 36-year career here at Local 4, we set four different temperature records in the same day.
We set a record high of 65 degrees, a record warmest low of 49 degrees, a record warmest average temperature for the day of 57 degrees, and a rainfall record for that day at 1.10 inches. Setting four records in one day is extraordinary.
Our highest daily rainfall total of the year was 2.51 inches on Sept. 25, and our biggest snowstorm was a record 9.2 inches on Feb. 9.
Totaling things up for the year, we had 21 heat records broken, no cold records broken, five daily rainfall records broken and one daily snowfall record broken.
The year 2018 was a crazy year of weather for us, and you survived it. Happy New Year!