Tuesday February 27, 2024
Yale Climate Connections —
t’s not that the United States has been entirely bereft of snow during what’s likely to end up as the nation’s warmest winter on record. But for most of the traditionally snowy swaths from the northern Great Plains to the Northeast, there’s been a startling lack of winter storms in 2023-24. The result: widespread bare ground in midwinter and what could end up being some all-time lows for seasonal snowfall.
On top of that, there have been a couple of bizarre cases of extremely dry or wet snows, both of which threw monkey wrenches into the forecast and left many snow lovers crestfallen.
At weather.com, Jonathan Erdman pulled together some of the noteworthy seasonal stats for a February 23 writeup. Erdman noted that the average snow extent across the contiguous U.S. on that date was a paltry 17%. That’s well short of the average to date of 37%, and the lowest for any February 23 in satellite-derived data going back to 2004.