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Leap Day is going to keep March from coming in like a lion.
As this weekly weather column posts late in the day on Wednesday, Feb. 28, Southwest and Southside Virginia will be going through a remarkable cycle of weather extremes in a short time frame.
There will be unseasonably mild temperatures, 60s and some 70s; heavy rain; maybe thunderstorms with some risk of severe wind gusts; then a sharp shift to cold westerly to northwesterly winds that could gust to near 50 mph at times and will dump the temperatures into the 20s and 30s by Thursday morning, with perhaps a quick burst of wet snow in the higher elevations of the western parts of our region Wednesday evening.
(This column posts on the Cardinal News website at 4 p.m. and on the emailed newsletter at 6 p.m. each Wednesday, so considering some timing variance on the various forecast models and a nearly 300-mile-wide region, I won’t attempt to say what phase of that cycle your particular spot will be at when you read this. You can look or step outside and get a pretty good idea.)
In most years, this roaring cascade of weather extremes would be occurring on the last evening of February into the early morning hours of the first day of March, and many people would be talking about how March is coming in like a lion — so it would presumably go out like a lamb. But, alas, this is a leap year, and February has a 29th day on Thursday.
Instead, March will come in on Friday more calmly like a lamb, though one shivering a bit, with widespread lows in the 20s to lower 30s and only rebounding to the 40s to near 50 for most. That is actually a little below normal for the first day of March, but that day is going to be the exception rather than the rule for several days following. After a bit of a cool rain late Friday and early Saturday, we warm up into the 60s and 70s for highs most days next week.
However it comes in or goes out, March appears set to have quite a bit of roar to it.
The weather pattern appears very likely to tilt to warmer than normal temperatures through at least mid-March and likely beyond, as any features that could force colder air south from the North Pole region will be absent.
There will likely be occasional low-pressure systems that will drag through gusty, brisk cold fronts. Any cold air will be short lived and not extreme, but each successive system could bring rain, thunderstorms, and gusty winds, as is happening Wednesday, followed quickly by a renewed warmup.
The pattern ahead screams early spring far more than it does late winter, with mixed signals on whether a somewhat colder pattern can set up toward the latter half of month. By then, with historically low snowpack in many areas north of us, a flood of Pacific-origin air over the continent rather than much from the Arctic, and just the fact that the sun angle and length of days will be similar to those of the waning days of astronomical summer in September, it will get more difficult to pull off truly wintry weather even with a colder atmospheric pattern.
Snow can and has happened after a mild February and/or a warm start to March, even in fairly recent years, but appears likely to have extra obstacles this particular spring, especially considering climate trends as a whole. Probably only an extremely anomalous upper-level low coupled with significant cold-air damming and blocking high pressure in the northern latitudes could deliver anything resembling widespread snow outside of the high ridges by late March and early April.
A more likely concern than late snow will be the potential for freezes following what is likely to be an accelerated budding, blooming and greening cycle in days ahead with prolonged warmth, already well underway not far south of us. It does not take an extraordinary series of events to deliver some clear, cold nights in the 20s deep into April and sometimes even early May, especially west of the Blue Ridge. Many people lost output from their fruit trees after even more accelerated greening last winter, followed by some occasional freezes in the spring.
Friday, March 1, marks the first day of spring on the meteorological calendar, which is chopped off even with the start and end of months for statistical convenience, and the end of another of several recent winters much milder than long-term averages across our region.
Another warm winter
Nationally, this is going to be the warmest winter on record. If there was any doubt about that with mostly unfrozen Great Lakes and almost no snow cover anywhere except Western U.S. mountains or the interior Northeast (there was a little strip in eastern West Virginia’s mountains as late as Monday), this week’s extreme central U.S. warmth surge that pushed 90s into Texas and 70s to Minnesota sealed the deal.
It has been another mild winter in Southwest and Southside Virginia, but not quite as high ranking for warmth as last winter was in our region or this one has been nationally.
Much like what happened in a record-breaking summer nationally that wasn’t extremely hot here, the core of the winter warmth relative to normal has stayed to our west and northwest, particularly over the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes region. Regionally, our winter average temperatures generally rank among the top third of warmest temperatures on record, but not as highly as last winter did, which was commonly among the top two to five warmest on record. (At most regional locations, 1931-32 remains the single warmest winter on record by a considerable margin, but recent years make up a disproportionate number of the 10 to 20 warmest years on record at sites with data extending more than 100 years.)
Roanoke is something of a high-end outlier, as the 2023-24 winter through Monday was the sixth warmest winter on record dating to 1912, averaging 42.9 degrees. Seven of the 14 warmest winters on record at Roanoke have happened since 2011, with five of those since 2016. Commercial growth over the past four decades around Roanoke’s airport weather sensor site appears to be adding an urban heat island element to the city’s official temperatures, which are now on par with many Southside localities.
With a couple days left, this winter ranks 17th warmest at Blacksburg (37.3) since 1893; tied for 17th warmest in the Bristol area (40.6) since 1937 as measured at Tri-Cities Airport in Tennessee; 24th warmest at Lynchburg (40.8) since 1892; 29th warmest at Danville (42.3) since 1917; and a more middling 46th at Bluefield, W.Va., (39.1) since 1909.
While there is long-term global climate warming, record global ocean average temperatures, a multi-year recurring fast jet stream flow off the Pacific Ocean and the shorter-term intensification of northern North America winter warmth from El Niño involved, it is also true that what cold air there is in the Northern Hemisphere has pooled on the other side of the North Pole away from us.
Shanghai, China, a coastal city near the same latitude as New Orleans, recorded it first wintry precipitation — freezing rain — in 150 years of weather records last week. Even in a warming global climate, there are pockets of extremely cold air somewhere. Aside from a brief period in mid-January, those pockets generally haven’t been over North America most of this winter.
It has been a wet winter, also, especially east of the Blue Ridge. At both Lynchburg and Danville, the winter ranked 13th rainiest with near or just above 13 inches total before Tuesday, with additional rain on Tuesday and Wednesday likely to move it up the list. Rainfall has been more toward the upper third or middle of the pack at most locations to the west, but has been plenty to spring the entire region from widespread drought just a few months ago.
It has also been a low to nonexistent snowfall winter, depending on location. Next week, unless pre-empted by more urgent near-term weather to discuss, I plan to dive more deeply into recent winter snowfall and temperature trends in our region and at least scratch the surface of the iceberg on the increasingly discussed subject of whether winter as we have known it is a dying breed or just taking a few years’ hiatus.
Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 20 years. His weekly column, appearing on Wednesdays, is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley.
