Never mind spring, it has felt more like summer on some days early in this March.
Friday rewrote the record book for March 6, with highs of 84 degrees at Roanoke and Danville, 83 at Lynchburg and 79 at Blacksburg, the highest in over a century of records at each location. These were the earliest temperatures this hot or hotter at these climate stations since similar ones on Feb. 22, 2018.
Tuesday repeated the feat for March 10, with highs of 84 at Danville, 83 at Roanoke, 82 at Lynchburg, and 77 at Blacksburg. It was the first time in 50 years that Roanoke has had three days with highs at or above 80s in the first 10 days of March.
UPDATE 6:30PM, 3/11/26: As this weather column posted Wednesday afternoon, high temperatures on Wednesday soared to even greater heights … 89 at Danville, 87 at Roanoke, 86 at Lynchburg, 81 at Blacksburg. Truly summerlike temperatures that smashed daily high temperature records for March 11 by 4 to 7 degrees. Overnight will bring showers and storms, and, incredibly, it might turn cold enough just fast enough for some wet snowflakes at least in some higher elevations by Thursday. END UPDATE
South Boston and the John H. Kerr Dam each soared to a truly summerlike high of 86 degrees this past Friday. To give you some idea of how hot that is, the Mecklenburg County dam’s high temperature was 86 or higher only 11 out of 31 days last August. (Granted, last August was cooler than normal.)
March is known for being mercurial with regard to its temperatures, truly a month when it seems all four seasons can alternate in short order.
Warm regards for March
Recently, starting in 2019 and throughout the 2020s so far, March has been decidedly on the spring side of the ledger most of the time rather than being more like winter.
After some continued warmth continuing on this Wednesday, the rest of the week will be cooler after some showers and thunderstorms on Wednesday afternoon and evening, more in the 50s and 60s for highs than 70s and 80s. We’ll gradually warm back up to some 70s highs over the weekend, before next week likely turns colder.
But there is every reason to think right now that the exceptional warmth we’ve already experienced this March plus a last-week rebound will be enough to make this March yet another warm one relative to normal, fitting with recent trends.
Sometimes, though, March is downright winterlike. 1960 was an extreme example of that, both the coldest and snowiest March on record at multiple locations in our region. More recently, both 2013 and 2018 have had a March that was an extension of winter in our region, with multiple snow events and frequent cold temperatures.
March 2018 was notable for following an extreme late February heat surge with a cold month and three snow events over much of our region, the third of which late in the month dumped 5-15 inches on many locations in the New River Valley, across the Blue Ridge and into some of Southside.
That was sort of a last hurrah for wintry March weather in recent times, aside from that little March 12 snow that kept the 2022-23 winter from being nearly totally snowless in a large part of our region.
In each March from 2020 to 2024, Roanoke, Danville and Lynchburg have averaged 50 or more degrees in each one, except for March 2023 when Lynchburg dipped slightly to 49.8. Long-term, around 46-48 degrees is more normal at those locations for a March average temperature.
March snowfall, common in the 2010s, has largely been missing in our region in the 2020s.
Between 2019 and 2024, Roanoke has totaled just 0.8 inch of snow in the month of March. March 2019, with just 0.1 inch, was the caboose on an unprecedented 11-year run when each March produced at least some measurable snow. But since then, four of the six Marches have had no snow or trace amounts.
Blacksburg is similar. March 2018 dumped 22.7 inches of snow, the second snowiest March on record, but only 2.7 inches total has fallen in the seven Marches since, including zero accumulation or only 0.1 inch in four of them.
One of the region’s snowiest locations has seen a similar shift, with Burke’s Garden in Tazewell County averaging only 0.8 inch of snow in March from 2020 to 2025, peaking at 3 inches in 2022. This is the lowest five-year average for March snowfall since the early 1920s – history sort of repeating itself a century later?
The results are similar across at many locations across our region – the early to mid-2020s have been on the mild and not snowy end compared to March historically.
March trend similar to recent winters
Some of this trend is undoubtedly a carryover from a period when the preceding winters have commonly also been mild and not snowy, but it has continued in these last couple of years when winter has been cold and quite impactful.
In concepts attributed to global climate change, shoulder months between seasons are often expected to exhibit more change in local or regional areas than core months. So with a warming global climate, it would be more likely over time that March would become wintry less often than January.
But there are also multi-year periods of natural variability that can alternate. As noted previously, the 2009-18 period experienced colder and snowier winters in our region than the dozen or so years before, and perhaps not coincidentally, that period also saw March tilt to the wintry side more often than it has in more recent years.
We recently saw December make a comeback in being wintry.
Aside from the blip for a widespread foot-plus snowstorm in 2018 (that year keeps coming up!), December has largely been an absentee winter month for most of our region in much of the last decade, but winter suddenly reasserted itself this past December with two widespread snowfalls in the first eight days and overall colder than normal temperatures for the month as a whole.
It’s far early to say December is back or that March is permanently lost to wintry impacts. Chances are there will be fluctuations in future years.
Even in this particular March, it is still possible that colder air in the second half of this month will be extensive enough to offset early warmth somewhat and perhaps even set the stage for a snow flirtation or two.
For now, it looks like a somewhat colder period but not likely to be a full winter relapse for our region, with more impactful wintry weather staying mostly north of our latitude.
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.
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