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These haven’t been Roaring Twenties when it comes to regional snowfall in Southwest and Southside Virginia.
Five-year average snowfall, presuming no more accumulates in weeks ahead, is the lowest it’s been in more than a century of weather records at Lynchburg (4.3 inches) and Roanoke (5.6 inches) and the lowest in 94 years of continuous weather records at Wytheville (7.6 inches). Blacksburg’s 5-year average snowfall is below 10 inches, at 9.5, for the first time since at least the 1950s, when the data gets squishy. Even Tazewell County icebox Burke’s Garden, with a couple years near or just below a foot total, is in danger of dropping below 20 inches on its 5-year average (currently 20.5) for the first time since the Eisenhower presidency if there is another weak snowfall winter next year.
Danville and Martinsville don’t have enough complete snowfall data going back decades to make these kind of comparisons, but, unlike the rest of Cardinal News country to the north and west, neither location got measurable snow this winter, which quite remarkably will fall short of the meager decimals that fell a year before in late fall to early spring, if snow doesn’t materialize out of what looks to be a warm pattern in much of March.
Three of the last five cold seasons — 2019-20, 2022-23 and 2023-24, presuming there isn’t a tardy plop yet to come — have each produced extremely low snowfall totals relative to historic averages across nearly all of our region. The two in the middle were considerably more wintry — particularly January 2022, with below-normal temperatures and two sizeable snowfall episodes — but not enough to offset the dearth of snow in the other three.
· Short-term weather: After a rainy Wednesday, more rain is expected late Friday into Saturday as temperatures remain mild, mostly 50s and 60s, perhaps some 70s on Thursday afternoon with sunshine. After a breezy and somewhat cooler late weekend, temperatures begin warming up again next week. Late March has some signals of a cooler pattern, but it is still unclear if that could be a winter relapse or, more likely, just not as consistently warm as the early month is. Freezes and frosts will be a concern for several weeks as some trees and plants bloom and bud prematurely in early March warmth.
Inevitably, a snow drought in this age of social media and the often-heated discussion surrounding global warming triggers the push-and-pull between “This is climate change and how it’ll be from now on,” and “It snowed a lot more just a few years ago, it’ll come back.” As we’ll discuss, most climate and weather experts would say each concept has some truth related to regional snowfall.
Regional snowfall is historically erratic
The general trend in past decades and expectation in forthcoming ones are that winters in our region are getting warmer and annual snowfall lighter. But this hasn’t been happening in a linear manner, with each winter always being warmer and/or less snowy than the one before it, nor is it expected to in the future. There have been, and likely will continue to be, ups and downs in the data, especially the smaller the region being considered, as seasonal patterns shift year to year. Clusters of years with more or less snow emerge, even over the past couple of decades.
As recently as 2014, Roanoke’s 5-year average snowfall was north of 20 inches, at 21.2, having recovered from a dip to 7.8 in 2009, and was above 18 inches as recently as 2018. The 2013-14, 2014-15 and 2015-16 winters were the first time Roanoke had 20 or more inches of snow in three consecutive winters (fall to spring “cold seasons,” to be more precise) since the disco days of the late 1970s. Global climate was well above 20th-century average temperatures and warming steadily between 2009 and 2018, yet our region’s snowfall bounced steeply upward, for a few years.
While the current snow drought is the most extreme, it is not close to the first time snowfall has dropped precipitously for a few years. Lynchburg’s 5-year snowfall average has previously dipped below 10 inches in 1904, 1927-29, 1945-46, 1953-57, 1992, 1995, 2001-02, and 2008-09, only to be lifted upward by snowier subsequent winters each time.
(Snowfall amounts typically vary dramatically across our region from west to east, north to south and higher elevations to lower ones, but the year-to-year trends generally move in the same direction.)
In between the 1950s and early 1990s snowfall droughts, our region experienced the outrageously snowy 1960s, the extremely cold and pretty snowy 1970s, and a few more remarkably snowy years through the 1980s. Our region’s residents who grew up then often use those decades to base their sense of what a normal winter should be, but the 1990s to 2010s, each decade with a couple of bonus snowfall winters, several middling ones, and a few duds, seem to be more like the snowfall variability that occurred in the decades before the 1960s.
So it is well established that seasonal snowfall in our region has always been an erratic statistic, often linked to how a handful of potential winter storm setups play out each season, and rising and falling in clusters of years that appear to follow not always well understood natural cycles. Going strictly by that, it would be expected that larger snowfall winters will eventually return in a year or two or five, and our recency-biased minds will forget these snow-spare winters just like we forgot about the early 1990s or many years of the ’00s when we were shoveling piles in 1995-96 or 2009-10.
A tipping point?
But the question has been asked, sometimes stated more like a fully formed opinion in social media comments, about whether something is different this time, if a switch has been flipped in the breaker box of global climate that is making the mild, low-snow winters like the last two and three of the last five the “new normal” for our region rather than an occasionally recurring aberration.
· Climate change discussion in Cardinal Weather: “Weather isn’t climate but in aggregate inevitably takes us there, and at times, we’ll look at how climate is changing in our region and state. That includes ways that would be expected under the banner of global climate change — but sometimes, perhaps, quirky data that can seem locally at odds with larger trends. I am about nuance and context, not broad brush strokes. I do no politics or policy. Period.” — From inaugural Cardinal Weather column, Oct. 12, 2022.
It is generally not expected by scientists studying climate that our regional snowfall will suddenly dive off a cliff and flat-line in the immediate future, but there is the potential for “tipping points” where climate factors pass a certain level in one or more parameters, and the cascading impacts cause something that had been infrequent or extreme to become common.
While there is no obvious particular tipping point that can readily be identified that would suggest minimal-snow winters should happen almost every year from now on in our region, there are some new wrinkles and recurring themes in recent winters that have many people who follow weather wondering if something has changed.
Oceans have spiked to excessive warmth, compared to several prior decades, in the last couple of years. Sea surface temperatures have generally been warming for many years, but global average sea surface temperatures have been warmer than anything seen in recent decades through much of the later three-fourths of 2023 and early in 2024. Much of this seems to be related to a spike in sea surface temperatures specifically in the Atlantic Ocean.
Two factors that have seemed to be regular interferences with prolonged colder weather and winter storms over the past several years are a frequently recurring dome of high pressure off the southeast U.S. coast and fast jet-stream level winds moving out of the Pacific over the North American continent. The southeast high-pressure dome deflects colder air masses away and keeps the storm track north and west of our region, putting us on the mild, rainy side of most storm systems. The fast Pacific jet tends to flood the continent with milder air as storm systems speed along west to east, keeping Arctic air from penetrating from the north as often and not allowing storm systems to dig far enough south to become winter storms for our region.
We are also presently in a yo-yo pattern between stronger El Niño and La Niña signals — the alternate warming and cooling of equatorial Pacific sea surface temperatures — rather than longer respites at a neutral level in the middle. The current strong El Niño has been a significant influence on our mild, wet winter and has undoubtedly contributed to record warmth and lack of snow and ice cover in the Upper Midwest that has spearheaded the warmest winter on record nationally. It now appears likely there will be a flip to La Niña by next winter which often (but not always) leads to milder, drier winters in our region.
El Niño has been notoriously “feast or famine” for regional snowfall, this winter falling on the “famine” side with none of the wetter storms and the short-lived cold air spurts connecting. (Too bad many forecasters, and this weather writer, gambled on the “feast” side.) We went through a somewhat similar windshield-wiper back-and-forth on El Niño and La Niña in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with most of those winters having lower regional snowfall totals, aside from a couple of bigger dumps each affecting about half of the region.
Are the above phenomena tied to natural patterns that will cycle out eventually or hard-baked into more permanence by a warming global climate? There is much hypothesis and analysis ongoing on these questions, though not necessarily focused on what they will mean specifically for our region in a single season.
Another recent study found that the size of the pool of Arctic air in the Northern Hemisphere winter has been shrinking in recent years, with this past winter’s pool being the second smallest on record in 76 years of records. The less coverage of Arctic air, the less likely it is to spread or be sustained in any particular region farther south. However, it should be noted that the winters ranked first (2014-15), third (2013-14) and fourth (2003-04) for smallest coverage of Arctic air each produced notable periods of cold and snow that affected our region. So it’s not always the size of the Arctic air pool, but how it gets directed by atmospheric features, that determines how much cold and snow reach us.
Three possible scenarios
Summing it all up, there are three general possibilities related to our recent regional snowlessness.
- The climate has recently crossed a tipping-point threshold of some sort and most regional winters from now on will be similar to these past two, and last three of five, with minimal snow.
- Natural cycles are principally the reason for this low-snow stretch and future winters will at some point rebound again to larger snowfall totals as large-scale atmospheric features set up differently, as they did in many years 2009-18 after several meager early 2000s winters, even as global temperatures continued to warm.
- Large-scale climate change is substantially altering natural cycles, so while there will be considerable year-to-year variation and some future winters snowier than these have been, low-snow winters will continue to be more frequent than they have been previously and most snowier winters will generally have lower totals than the bigger winters of the past.
The last of the three would probably have the most widespread consensus among climatologists and meteorologists, but the first two might also have some support, or at least gut-level conjecture.
There is absolutely no point arguing about which of the three it is now, because whether the 2022-23/2023-24 winters are the start of a longer snow-bare trend or a temporary aberration from something at least somewhat more typical of how our region has experienced winter won’t really begin to be known until at least a decade of hindsight — or, by the book for what is truly considered “climate,” another 30 years.
If we get to 2034 and, say, seven of the past 10 winters have been similar to these two with little or no snow, we’ll have a pretty solid idea that this kind of winter has become the default.
For now, we’ve just gone through a few winters that are not as snowy as several before were, which in turn were much snowier than several before those, all happening as global average temperatures have climbed.
Consecutive years of near-snowlessness for our region in the 2020s look and feel cyclical to me, still a couple or three decades earlier than it might become common if present planetary warming trends continue unchecked.
Time will tell.
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.
