It’s warming up but it’s not spring yet

I was in Houston last weekend, where the air was muggy and temperatures were in the mid-70s and 80s. It felt great!

Having grown up in Oklahoma and Texas, I have to admit that I miss the early arrival of springtime. For folks in the central and southern U.S., March not only marks the beginning of much milder weather, but severe weather season as well. Across the Panhandle, March weather more closely resembles winter than anything else.

This would make sense, as winter officially holds on until the third week of March each year. Although temperatures over the last couple of days may have given you a touch of spring fever, locally, March weather records are filled with more instances of snow and chilly temperatures than bouts of warm, sunny conditions. On this date in 1962, storms brought snow anywhere from 6 inches to a foot deep across North Idaho.

Average highs at the beginning of the month are in the mid-40s with lows in the upper 20s. By the end of the month, average highs move into the mid-50s with average lows right at the freezing mark. The warmest temperature for the month of March in Coeur d’Alene is 73 degrees, observed on March 30, 1978. Average precipitation is about 2 inches.

Easter Sunday comes especially early this year, and the people who design Easter dresses for definitely don’t spend much time in this part of the country. Each year I comb through the clothing racks trying to find dresses with jackets, sweaters, or at least sleeves for my daughter and myself. It is usually slim pickings, but March and even early April weather is notorious here for being breezy, cool and unsettled. One of the things you may notice this month is a change in the type of precipitation that falls. March still averages nearly 6 inches of snow, but it’s more likely you’ll be dealing with fast falling graupel, also called soft hail or snow pellets, than the gently falling snow flakes seen in the heart of winter.

With strong winter storms still a possibility well into this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its WP-3D “hurricane hunter” aircraft is not too far away. Usually reserved for use in other parts of the U.S., the airplane is currently being deployed from a temporary base in Portland to fly into severe winter storms over the Pacific Ocean that will affect the continental United States.

As part of NOAA’s Winter Storms Reconnaissance program, data is being collected from these Pacific systems in the hopes of improving the forecasts released 12 to 72 hours before a winter storm. The aircraft releases dropwindsondes, which are small meteorological instruments that measure temperature, wind speed, humidity and air pressure. This extra data, is then relayed in real time to NOAA’s National Weather Service supercomputer, which incorporates it into the agency’s numerical prediction models. These computer models are what guide local meteorologists in making their forecasts for the Inland Northwest. But the computer model’s forecasts are only as good as the data that gets initially fed into them. The more numerous and accurate measurements we have of current conditions, the better the forecast products will be.

Weather folklore says that March “…comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb.” March is expected to be cooler and wetter than normal, but whether things settle down toward the end of the month remains to be seen. More on the origins of that saying in next week’s column.