WASHINGTON — Spring is getting the cold shoulder.
The season officially begins later this week, but baseball games and cherry blossoms have taken a back seat to shovels and yard sticks.
Across the region, snowfall totals for the winter season have been about double the average. The storm Sunday night into Monday made the figures even more lopsided.
Washington Dulles International Airport has recorded 49 inches of snow, compared with an average of 22; Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport has reported almost 39 inches, compared with an average of 20; and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport has received more than 30 inches for the season, compared with an average of 15.4.
The data come from the National Weather Service.
Since December, the average temperature of 38 degrees — taken at Reagan National Airport — has been 1.4 degrees below the 30-year climate normal, according to meteorologist Brian LaSorsa at the National Weather Service.
But the mid-Atlantic region had been warned about a harsh winter. Last summer, the Farmers’ Almanac predicted a return to the “Days of Shivery.”
It used words such as “piercing cold,” “bitterly cold” and “biting cold” to describe what the region has now endured.
“In your neck of the woods, we said ‘cold, wet and white,'” says Farmers’ Almanac Managing Editor Sandi Duncan. “I’d have to say we were pretty darn accurate.”
The winter of 2013-14 leaves behind numerous record low temperatures, countless snow days and a popular awareness of the Polar Vortex.
But the opposite extreme could be on the way this summer.
The very publication that predicted bitter cold and lots of snow expects the upcoming summer to be “oppressively humid, wet and thundery.”
“No matter how hot or humid it is, I don’t want to hear any complaints from anybody if they look back on the winter and remember how cold and white it was,” Duncan jokes.
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