As You Suspected, Vermont Had A Very Warm March

Daffodils in my garden in northwestern Vermont were getting ready
to bloom yesterday, March 31, among the earliest I can remember.

Up until this year, the past few Marches in Vermont have been pretty wintry, with big, sometimes immense snowstorms and subzero chilly periods.

This year certainly broke the pattern, didn't it?

The stats from Burlington are kind of impressive, actually. The average temperature for March was 37.3 degrees, which was 6.3 degrees on the toasty side.

That was good enough to make the month the ninth warmest March on record, out of the past 135 years or so.

The warmest March on record was the insanely summerlike March of 2012, which feature three days that topped 80 degrees!

The warmth was statewide, with most places running around four or five degrees warmer than average this March.

This March, the warmth wasn't nearly as extreme as 2012, but if anything, was more consistent than in 2012.  The coolest it ever got all month in Burlington was 11 degrees above zero. There have been a handful of Aprils with colder temperatures than that.  The only day all month that failed to rise above freezing was March 1.

The result is one of the earliest starts to spring I can remember, as far as what the Vermont landscape looks like. In my memory, only 2012 had a "greener" look at the end of March..

Yesterday, the final day of March in Vermont, lawns are greening up around me in and near St. Albans, up in the northwest corner of the state. Most of my perennials in my gardens are up, and some early daffodils have flower buds and are almost ready to bloom.  That usually doesn't happen until the middle or third week in April.

March, 2020 was also relatively gentle in Vermont in terms of storms, especially compared to what many Marches bring.  Precipitation across the state was near average, with snowfall at or below normal.

A mourning dove, lower left, checks out some very early season
green spring shoots in my St. Albans, Vermont garden on Tuesday.

No storms were particularly heavy, so the typical March ice jams and flooding during thaws never happened.

There were some early season thunderstorms in parts of the state on March 20 and especially on March 29, which is about a month before we Green Mountain boys and girls usually start seeing lightning an hearing thunder.

The March warmth this year was widespread, covering most of the nation, especially from the central Plains eastward.  Final numbers aren't in, but I know many cities in the East will list March 2020 as one of their top five warmest on record.

An exception is northern Maine, where Caribou still had around a couple feet of snow on the ground as of yesterday. It was snowing there this morning.

As always, who knows what this new month will bring in terms of weather.  The first couple of days will be coolish, but a milder trend is forecast to start Friday.  Which means our very early spring will continue on, at least for now.