sSpring Arrives Friday: What To Expect, And Hopes For A (Slightly) Wet Season

Astronomical spring starts this coming Friday. I
am definitely ready for it!

 Spring arrived on March 1 for people enmeshed in meteorology and climatology. 

But the rest of the world goes by the start of astronomical spring. For us, spring starts at 10:46 a.m. this Friday. Hallelujah! 

The early signs of spring are already here: 

Red wing blackbirds have been doing their "conk la REE" song for a week or two now. There's rumored sightings of crocuses in protected southern exposures around the state. The first green nubs of my daffodils have tentatively poked through the ground in may gardens. 

Clearly,  the worst of winter is over for most of us. Don't tell that to anybody in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which just had a record blizzard there, and some places in the region have four to as many as six feet of snow on the ground. I'm glad that's not our problem!  

Average temperatures around rise fastest from around mid-March to mid-April.  In Burlington, the  normal high temperature today is 41 degrees. By April 18, a mere month from now, normal afternoon temperatures will be 57 degrees, so that's quite an improvement.. 

Even though a generally cooler the normal weather pattern has set up, it will get more and more difficult to see some truly wintry cold waves. Difficult but not impossible. It's been below zero in Burlington as late as March 29 1923   Widespread subzero cold froze Vermont as late as April 7, 1972.

But spring is volatile in Vermont. It's also been as hot as 84 degrees in March (1946 and 1998) and 92 degrees in April (1976).

On the negative side, measurable snow has fallen well into May in the past. Let's hope that history doesn't repeat itself this year.  

As far as how the weather will turn out this spring, the short answer - as always, - is "Who knows?" The folks at NOAA pretty much throw up their hands at this one. They give us in the Northeast equal chances of above or below norma temperatures this spring. They also give us equal chances of above or below normal rainfall. 

Believe it or not, there's still a lingering drought in parts of the Green Mountain State. It's not nearly as bad as it was last summer and autumn, but it's still a potential problem. Since things have been frozen all winter, the U.S. Drought Monitor maps have also been "frozen," in Vermont, with no change since mid-December.

The U.S. Drought Monitor maps still show drought in northeastern Vermont and abnormal dryness in southern areas of the state through the winter. The next Drought Monitor maps comes out tomorrow, and it will be interesting to see if anything changed now that things have begun to thaw out. 

In any event, precipitation hasn't been that impressive this winter. The first half of the season brought is near to slightly below normal precipitation.

February and so far March have been dry. It seems for the past couple months, the bigger storms have sent their heaviest precipitation west, north, south and east of us, but never quite hitting Vermont directly. It's almost as if last year's drought has a kind of "muscle memory" that causes precipitation to avoid us.

Sure, we want a lot of bright, sunny, balmy spring days. We also want a wet spring to erase the last vestiges of last years's deep drought.  

Too bad we can't put in an order for what what would really work: Rainy nights and sunny days through the spring. 

But it's Vermont. Expect anything. Sunny and 80 one day, snow the next. Vermont's weather always keeps us on our toes. Especially in the spring