Do you have your tickets ready to jump on board the March weather roller-coaster? Whether you do or not, you’re about to take a ride.
A strong cold front pushing into mild, moist air has triggered a risk of thunderstorms, some severe, on this Wednesday. I am typing this hours before that is set to occur, so we’ll leave the results of it to your observations and local news reports. Tornadoes are a possibility — should any be confirmed in the Southwest or Southside Virginia coverage area of Cardinal News, we will post a follow-up article on that.
But whether storms are all that bad or not, we’ll see 60s temperatures on Wednesday collapse into 20s and 30s by Thursday morning, with snow showers blowing over the mountains. By next week, we’ll be warm again, and maybe colder again sometime later in the month, though this is uncertain, and some long-range forecasts have the springlike trend rolling right into April.
This is the weather that makes people sick, I’ve often heard in my almost 55 years. I’m not sure that statement has any real medical heft behind it, but I’m not in much of a position to argue, given that my being “under the weather” to start March is the reason for the relative brevity of today’s Cardinal Weather column.
But this is March in a nutshell, probably the month that more than any of the other 11 has the greatest propensity to emulate all four seasons at some point during its 31 days.
For instance, at Roanoke, March is the only month of the 12 that has had a high temperature of 90 degrees (1945) and snowstorms of a foot or more (1960, 1993).
But you don’t have to go deep in the record book to find high contrast between March weather, year to year.
At Blacksburg, three of the 12 warmest Marches on record have occurred since 2012. But so did the second snowiest, in 2018, with nearly 23 inches in three March winter storms a month after experiencing the first 80-degree February day.
March is often chaotic at the cusp of winter and spring as the jet stream begins to lift northward, but in the process, both pushes of warm air northward and lobes of cold air sinking southward cause it to get, quite literally, loopy at times.
The storm system bringing us rain and storms on Wednesday will also carry a hefty blizzard behind it across the Upper Midwest, including some areas that had remarkably little snow compared to normal this winter.
We’ve lost a lot of the blocking high-pressure features in the Northern Hemisphere that forced and held cold air southward much of this chilly, icy winter season. That pattern has simply played itself out, but there is still enough of a remnant of it to drive another cold air mass down this weekend.
A system moving across the South by around Sunday or Monday could pose a hint of a chance of showers — rain or snow — but this looks unlikely to be much as of this writing.
If this passes as expected without depositing noticeable slush, it may well be that all but the highest elevations and some of the western border areas are done with snow for the 2024-25 cold season. Long-range trends suggest a strong eastern U.S. ridge and western U.S. low-pressure trough, which would take the cold and stormy weather out there while leaving us warm and relatively dry.
But we never quite know that — 2013 and 2018 both brought not one but two bouts of snow across much of our region after the start of calendar spring on March 20.
Be ready for a few spills and chills on the way to spring.
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. Sign up for his weekly newsletter:
