Historically mild winter a potential glimpse of 'new normal'
Meteorological winter brings fourth-lowest snow total in Albany since record keeping began.
By
Patrick Tine
Feb 29, 2024
In the Capital Region it has been, largely, the winter that wasn’t.
The end of February marks the end of meteorological winter and Albany will finish the season with its fourth-lowest snow total since formal record-keeping began in 1884. The paltry 22.6 inches of snow recorded at Albany International Airport over the last three months was not entirely unexpected said Brett Rathbun, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in Albany.
The weather service’s outlook, published last fall, favored higher temperatures this meteorological winter which began in December.
“The overall pattern we were expecting would mean more of a challenge for snow and this is what we did see for the entire winter season,” Rathbun said.
Mild, at times even balmy, conditions broke high-temperature records across the Capital Region in late February as daffodil shoots could be seen in area gardens, while what was left of snow the area did receive melted away.
Rathbun said a strong El Niño,
as expected, played a role in the historically mild winter. Over the summer, the weather service’s Climate Prediction Center said that temperatures in the northeast had around a 50 percent chance of being higher than normal as the El Niño climate pattern returned to the Pacific for the first time in four years.
The El Niño winter of 2015-16 was also historically warm with 72-degree temperatures on Christmas Day and only 16.9 inches of snow recorded between December and February.
Mathias Vuille, a professor in the department of atmospheric and environmental sciences at the University at Albany, said that while El Niño is contributing to warmth in the northeast, climate change is also increasingly to blame.
“Mild winters show the long-term trend of increasingly warm temperatures,” Vuille said. “We’re sort of getting a glimpse of the future here.”
He said that while not every year will be as bereft of snow as this one, eventually warmer temperatures will become “the new normal.”
In the meantime, as the climate changes, Vuille said future winters might produce more snow. “One effect of climate change is more water vapor in the air,” he said. “The air is juicier if you will.”
More moisture in the air leads to increased precipitation which, so long as the temperature stays below freezing, will lead to powerful winter storms.
This winter, though warm, has brought above-normal precipitation in the form of rain, but it is too early to speculate on what a mostly snow-less winter might mean for the summer. “The ground has stayed wet and expected rainfall will keep the ground saturated and reservoirs full,” Rathbun said.
Sometimes storms that are expected to bring measurable, accumulating snow shift and spare some areas and pound others. Rathbun cited the storm in mid-February as one example. That storm was first expected to bring as many as eight inches of snow to the Capital Region and hit the Hudson Valley even harder. A last-minute track to the south brought over a foot to many Hudson Valley communities and nothing to Albany and points north.
“That was our better shot to see higher accumulations,” Rathbun said.
He did not rule out more wintry weather in meteorological spring, but did say that the Climate Prediction Center is expecting milder temperatures in March.
For Vuille, a native of Switzerland, whose research focuses on tropical climate change and who personally loves winter weather, mourns the absence of a “real” winter in the Capital Region, where he has lived and taught since 2008.
Looking at barren hills that were once reliably covered with snow this time of year is painful. “My heart is bleeding,” he said.
dumpage?
today.
