Outlook calls for more above-normal temps

March is usually a volatile weather month here in the Inland Northwest. Most years, we’ll see everything from snow, thundersnow, thunderstorms with graupel (soft hail or snow pellets), and of course those mild sunny days that give us spring fever.

Frosty mornings help us remember that it’s still too early to get the garden in. Though the Marches of the past two years have much more closely resembled winter than a prelude to spring, this month has definitely started out much differently, with the first two days of the month seeing highs in the middle and upper 50s. Average highs by mid-month should be in the upper 40s with average lows in the lower 30s. We typically see about 3 inches of snow in Spokane during March, while Coeur d’Alene averages about 6 inches. Speaking of snow, with a seasonal total of only 13.7 inches in the Spokane area (17.8 inches in Coeur d’Alene), it could be argued that this might be the least snowiest winter since records were kept at the Spokane airport.

Before 1947, weather observations for Spokane were taken at either downtown Spokane or at Felts Field in the Valley. There have been winters back then with as little as 9.5 inches of snow, but both the downtown and Felts locations are at lower elevations than the airport, so it wouldn’t be a fair comparison. For the Spokane airport, the least snowiest winter was the winter of 1980-’81 when only 14.2 inches fell. We’ll just have to see whether we manage to squeeze out another half inch of snow in the next six weeks or so. It wouldn’t take much of storm to make that happen.

So what are we to make of the old saying that says “March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb”? The start of the month has certainly been tame. That particular phrase actually appeared in literature as early as the 1600s. Though we often think of spring weather as volatile, the saying apparently has its origins in astronomy and with the constellations Leo, the lion, and Aries, the ram or “lamb.” I am not much of a stargazer myself, but Jack Horkheimer, the executive director of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium, had this commentary:

“So perhaps long ago someone tied this all together noticing that on the first day of March Leo the lion was just rising up into the heavens, whereas at the end of March Aries the ram was leaving them. And thus decided to poetically link both of them to the weather.”

We may see that “lamb” again at the end of the month one way or another, as the outlook for March continues to call for above normal temperatures and below normal precipitation.