If You Think This Winter In Vermont Was Tough, You're Just Out of Practice

Generally speaking, meteorologists like to regard winter as the period from December 1 to February 28 (Or February 29 in leap years)

It looks like Jackson the Weather Dog is
ready for spring after a (sort of) cold Vermont winter. 

The three months are normally the coldest of the year, so it makes sense to partition them that way.

The bottom line in Vermont?   Be prepared to be unimpressed. It wasn't that bad. The National Weather Service says out of the past 100 winters, 2013-14 was the 58th coldest.

We haven't had a winter this "bad" since.... wait for it......2009!

Yeah, yawn.

The problem is, we've grown soft. The winter of 2013-14 was only 1.3 degrees colder than normal. But  the previous winter was 3.5 degrees warmer than normal. And the winter before that was a whopping 5.8 degrees warmer than average.

So we're not used to the cold.

Also this winter, precipitation was just a little above normal, and snowfalls is running just a little below normal in Vermont.  So despite some occasional extremes, it all averaged out to be, well, pretty much average.

It was much colder in parts of the Midwest.  The winter of 2013-14 made the Top 10 list of coldest winters in several cities.   For instance, Chicago and Minneapolis had their 9th coldest winters on record. Dubuque, Iowa suffered through it's third coldest winter.

So far, I haven't found any place that had its coldest winter on record.

Some areas of the Midwest and Northeast are also experiencing one of their snowiest winters on record.

March, of course, is starting off wintry in much of the nation. There's coast to coast winter storm watches, warnings and advisories from Washington State, through the Midwest to New Jersey.

It's also very, very cold from the northern Plains to New England.

For the winter weary areas of the Northeast and Midwest, I see little sign of a big warmup in March.  Long range forecasts are always unreliable, but reading the tea leaves, I do see glimmers of hope for the strange people out there who actually love record cold.

There's a slight, very slight chance some people in the Midwest and Northeast could see their coldest March on record. Or at least scoring in the Top 10 coldest Marches.

For me, I could live without such records. I wouldn't mind seeing a warmer than normal March around my place in Vermont. I'm ready for gardening!