Winter barely showed up the way it usually does for millions of people from Oregon to Texas, as nine states logged their warmest meteorological winter on record.
As AccuWeather reports, the winter season is defined as Dec. 1 through the end of February. These dates are agreed upon by meteorologists for record-keeping and comparison purposes, but the historical average dates of the lowest temperatures varies from city to city.
NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, which has records back to 1895, said this winter was the warmest in Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma. And another five states experienced their second-warmest meteorological winter on record: Montana, Idaho, California, Nebraska and Kansas.
More Winter Weather Records Broken
Dozens of cities also had recorded their warmest winters ever, including Riverton, Wyoming, with a seasonal average of 32.2 degrees F, 13.5 degrees F above the historical average, and Bozeman, Montana, at 35.9, 10.9 degrees above average. Denver was also likely the warmest, though records there go back only 31 years.
In the eastern United States, it was colder than the historical average in most states away from the Gulf Coast, though not as extreme as in the West. Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland ranked in the top 35 coldest winters.
For the entire continental United States, winter ranked as the second-warmest and was the driest in 45 years.
Snowpack in Western U.S. Hit Record Lows
West of the Plains, snowfall ranged from zero to 50 percent (shown in red) of the 18-year historical average according to NOAA’s National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center. Unusual snowfall in the Southeast created a strip of 150 (blue) to 500 percent (purple) from the Florida Panhandle through eastern Georgia and the Carolinas.
The snowpack, or water in snow on the ground, in the western U.S. hit record lows almost every day this winter and has generated worries about the water supply. Ski resorts were also hit hard with a lack of snow, with Vail saying it was “a worst-case weather scenario.”
Snowfall was above historical averages across the core of the Midwest, including Michigan, southern Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and across much of the Northeast, excluding Maine and Maryland. Many New England ski areas and I-95 residents got a lot more snow than the historical average.
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Photo Credit: Bjoern Buxbaum Conradi / Shutterstock.com