January weather history is chock full of major winter storms. So, let’s take a little break from that to highlight some other weird weather that happened during the month in past years.
January 7 is a great day to do that. First, from Jan. 7-8, 1966, 59 years ago, Tropical Storm Denise drenched La Réunion, a French island about 460 miles east of Madagascar. But this was no ordinary soaking. The Foc-Foc reporting station measured 45 inches of rain in 12 hours and 71.8 inches in 24 hours, both world record rainfall rates for those time periods. That’s more rain in 24 hours than Miami averages in a year (67.41 inches).
This southern Indian Ocean volcanic island is well known for extreme rainfall as moist winds from tropical cyclones are lifted by the mountains. It also holds the world record 72-hour (154.72 inches) and 96-hour (194.33 inches) rainfalls, both from Cyclone Gamede in late Feb. 2007.
Seventeen years ago today, it was a tornado in an unusual place for early January that was eye popping. It happened when an outbreak of 48 tornadoes struck parts of Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois and southeast Wisconsin on Jan. 7, 2008. Two tornadoes tore through Kenosha County, Wisconsin. Prior to that, only one other Wisconsin January tornado had been documented since 1950.
One of those was rated EF3, as it leveled one home. Fortunately, nobody was killed, but 15 were injured along the almost 11-mile long path. The juxtaposition of tornado damage adjacent to a nearby partially frozen pond in the photo below is one I won’t soon forget.
This was yet another reminder that tornadoes can and do happen any time of the year the conditions are ripe. Even in January. Even in the upper Midwest.
Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at weather.com and has been covering national and international weather since 1996. Extreme and bizarre weather are his favorite topics. Reach out to him on Bluesky, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.
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