So, How Did February And The Whole Winter Stack Up Here In Vermont

Heavy snow falls on St. Albans, Vermont on January 20, during
the biggest snowstorm of the winter.

Welcome to meterological spring, when climatologists, just for ease of record keeping, say spring starts. They deem it to begin today, March 1, so there you go.

Which give us the opportunity to look back and see how February stacked up in Vermont, and also, winter as a whole.

First, let's tackle February. Around Burlington, despite a lot of ups and downs, the mean temperature for the month came out close to average. It averaged out at 22.2, which is just 0.7 degrees above normal.

Elsewhere in Vermont, in places like Montpelier and St. Johnsbury, the month came out at about a degree cooler than normal. Which is essentially typical for February.

When it did get cold in February, 2019, it was never that cold. Burlington got to zero or below on five mornings, but the chilliest one was only minus 5, which is well within what we'd expect in the winter. The hottest day was February 5, which reached 53 degrees - good enough to be a record high for the date.

The month was on the wet side. Burlington had 2.34 inches of precipitation, which was a little more than a half inch soggier than average.

Freezing rain glazes trees in Burlington, Vermont on February 6. There
was a lot of mixed precipitation during the winter of 2018-19,
so there was a lot of ice underfoot. 

For the winter as a whole, taking in meteorological winter from December 1 to February 28, temperatures bounced all over the place but landed just about normal if you average it all out.

Burlingon was a whopping one tenth of one degree warmer than average for the winter. Essentially spot on normal.

It was a wet winter. Burlington had 8.46 inches of rain over the three months, which is 2.26 inches above normal. Although we had plenty of snow, there was a lot of rain, too. That kept snow cover modest, at least in the Champlain Valley.

There was briefly 18 inches of snow on the ground in mid-January, but only ten days out of the entire winter had at least 10 inches of snow covering the Queen City's lawns and parks.

Snow cover is much healthier in the Northeast Kingdom, and in mid and high elevations. As of yesterday, there was 39 inches of snow on the ground in Granby and 37 inches in Sutton, both up in the NEK. Averill had 34 inches of snow on the ground Corinth had 32 inches. The summit of Mount Mansfield was up above 100 inches.