Okay, But, Seriously, Spring, What the Actual Hell
Posted on March 21, 2018 Posted by John Scalzi 105 Comments
Our backyard here on the second day of spring. To be clear, as late as 12 hours ago it was entirely snow free. Now look at this. It’s probably the most snow we’ve had fall in a single day the entire year to date. Get it together, spring! You’re better than this!
So, you piled under snow, too?
No snow in Atlanta, but unusually cool for this time of year. Which I’m enjoying.
Note that there’s not really any official “beginning of Spring”. The equinox is an astronomical moment; the timing of the seasons is variable depending on local climate.
We’re expecting snow later today here in New England but in the last 24 hours the prediction has gone from 8-10 inches to 3-5 inches so who the frak knows?
It’s a snow day in Northern Virginia. The schools and federal government are closed. It’s supposed to snow all day. Woke up to a blanket of white. It was just 50 degrees yesterday!
We have snow this morning. The ground’s too warm for it to stick, so I had all the fun of walking through masses of big, fluffy flakes and none of the bother of shoveling it.
I live in northern NJ and today my entire state is shut down, the kids are home from school, and we’re expecting our FOURTH Nor’easter. I AM OVER IT.
Southeast Mass / Cape Cod.
Fourth nor’easter in the last three weeks hitting today with 50+ Gusts
Fifth likely for Sun/Mon.
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!
You should probably remove that while filter; it’ll seriously screw up normal photos…. :) the high will be 90 outside tomorrow (Phoenix, AZ)….
I live in Minnesota. Yes. We’ll probably have snow here for another month.
Not yet, but we’re supposed to get an inch per hour until about 8pm. Everything is closed but as a telework-ready federal contractor I have to work or burn a vacation day (of which I have very few). Thank goodness Grandma came to take the baby away for as much of the day as she can manage.
I live in Alberta. Snow is possible all months of year – in my lifetime, shortest (no snowfalls)spring/summer has been May 20th to Sept 20th. My wife has seen a July snow.
San Diego, so nope. We did get some, I think it was in 1967.
No. In fact, we are so dry and warm that ski resorts are closing early and construction projects in the mountains are ahead of schedule. Colorado.
It’s cold (below freezing), but deceptively bright and sunny the past few days. The weather reports for the past couple of days say that the 4th Nor’easter will miss us (and the Fingerlakes region is far enough inland that we got some snow and slush from the previous 3, but not the brunt of it). There may be some residual snow, but the streets and sidewalks have been clear for a while.
Nope. Just a few hours north of you it’s been unseasonably cold but blessedly precipitation-free so far.
Snow has just begun but the big worry is losing power. I have cranked the heat to 65F just in case.
I’m sitting in New Hyde Park, NY, on Long Island. The travel ban on empty trailers in NJ and PA means I’m going to be sitting here a couple of days before I can head back to Ohio. And the reason for that ban is currently doing a fine job of dropping a mixture of ice and snow here. It has just stopped melting when it hits the ground, so I suspect it won’t be long before it starts piling up.
Pretty snow on the trees here in Central VA, but the roads are clear at least in the city.
This latest nor’easter will set a record for snowiest March in Worcester, MA. The parade of storms has been a pain, but it is nothing like February of 2015. I keep telling myself that things could be worse.
No snow in South GA (we did get an inch or two in January) but Mother Nature is being bi-polar. We’ll have highs in the 80s one day; then the lows will be in the 30s the next.
France here, and we had that one this weekend. Second snowfall of the entire winter (but it all melted yesterday).
We’ve got piles of snow from prior storms but the frigidly cold high pressure system is keeping the nor’easter from our doorstep this time. It was -1 yesterday morning when I got up, but hey, the sun was shining. #glasshalffull
A haiku I wrote yesterday:
I rode my bicycle to work yesterday (and will again today); barely any snow left here in the “frozen North” (southern Ontario), though temperatures are still hovering around freezing.
Snow here in Kentucky.
I’m in Oregon – we’re expecting light rain today and that’s pretty much it.
You could abandon the cold hemisphere and come back to Swancon… no snow at all here in Perth. Just sayin’
As noted by others, hitting tri-state coastal area right now with 12-15″ (NY, NJ, CT). Thinking of all affected. Also, David A.W. our friends at the Cape. My partner has been sadly watching the many vids posted of the damages and I believe last night one of Liam’s coming down :-(.
It’s been a wonderful winter as far as I’m concerned. Looking like a great spring, too! Seriously. Wouldn’t you rather have this than 90° and sweaty? At my age, putting on more clothes is much better than taking them off.
Paris here. We had snow yesterday that lasted a day. This winter has been the coldest and snowiest I remember in a long time.
It’s (almost) always sunny in Tel-Aviv.
Has anybody seen the meme going around where winter keeps leaving, then kicking in the door and yelling “and another thing…!”? I feel that’s fairly appropriate for all of us on the East Coast from about North Carolina up.
Imagine an insightful and thought-provoking comment here.
(Whoops – previous comment (and indeed this one) left on the wrong thread)
A couple hundred miles north of you. The storm wisely stayed in Ohio.
Clear/sunny – High in the low 40s – and a motorcycle on the road!
Yay Spring!!
Regards,
Dann
Basic Programmers Never Die! They just GOSUB w/o RETURN.
Here in Denver we’ve had almost no snow at all for this winter. It’s really a bit worrying.
It’s bizarre. In Maryland on Saturday and Sunday it was lovely, highs in the 50s and 60s. Yesterday the sleet and snow started, there’s a couple inches on my driveway, schools are closed, my work is closed, the government is closed, and it’s going to snow all day.
The bizarre part, to me, is that winters have been getting worse since I moved here 30 years ago, but the response is not getting better. If anything, it seems people are less able to cope with a little snow. Schools close on just the forecast of snow, as school administrators are completely unwilling to accept the possibility that a kid might slip and fall getting off a bus. (Schools were closed for *high wind* a couple weeks ago!) Rather than spend on additional snow-removal gear and encouraging actual snow tires, we just shut down more. It’s not just my feeling, either. A former school district official confirmed that 30 years ago schools closed an average of three days a year. Now they close an average of 5.5 days a year.
I’m gonna go clear my drive now.
Maryland is getting it right now and while it doesn’t look like a lot, this state isn’t the best at dealing with anything over a few inches LOL
Sunny and 75 in Central TX!
So umm it was 9 Fahrenheit here in Montreal when I went to work this morning… I expect snow won’t be fully gone until the first week of May or so, but it really shouldn’t be that cold still. Normal is 37 at this time of year.
It’s clear here in Iowa. We may have some snow on Saturday, which would be too bad because the March for Our Lives is scheduled for that day.
We got that in Saskatchewan at the beginning of the month– Sunday morning, blank streets; Monday morning, snow up past the hubs of most cars. Unusually for this part of Canada, they cancelled school buses for a couple of days (not school itself, though, because it wasn’t enough snow to conceal the building).
…and it only started to melt this week.
A meme I saw over the weekend referring to the weather here in the UK, “It’s like winter is really mad and keeps storming out of the room and then coming back yelling ‘And another thing!'”
Yeah, we’re buried under…no, actually, we hit 90 degrees in South Florida before the “cold” front (sic) came through. WE stayed an extra week down here to avoid the latest nor’easter (4 in three weeks!).
This is precisely why I moved from Cincinnati to Saint Augustine last fall. Winters in Ohio made me depressed from about mid-November until April. Dead trees, brown grass, clouds, and cold. I grew up there but about the time I turned 50 I started realizing I really didn’t want or have to live somewhere where for half the year everything was dead. Though, I will say that snow covered field is kinda pretty in a distant, keep it 700 miles away from me kinda way.
We have snow on the ground, and it flurried all day yesterday without any accumulation.
About 2 inches came down this morning. That wasn’t the bad part. The bad part was it’s on top of about a half inch of slush. Or as we call it in the ER, it’s a heart attack day. Spring in Ohio, you can measure our joy by the inch.
Albuquerque should hit 70 today. . . .
Mother Nature may be getting early onset alzheimers. All the warning signs are there.
Seattle and sunny again… 55 deg F later today.
Greetings from Hawaii (which no one in the US northeast wants to hear)! This year we got multiple blizzard warnings on top of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, high winds, and snow on Haleakala. At 7 a.m. it’s 68 degrees here at sea level. Take your boogie board to the top of the mountain and go sledding … but watch out when you hit the naked lava rock!
It’s cold but no snow here on the mid-East coast. Though I’d be okay with snow. I’m not a huge fan of Summer and what with Spring being it herald, I’m not overly fond of it either. Only thing good about Summer for me are the pluots and other fresh fruit.
@Rembrandt- I remember the snow in San Diego, I was 6 or 7. I remember my mother standing in the yard yelling “I moved from CT to get away from this!”
Here in Colorado, we’ve had unusually snow-less weather. Hoping we catch up soon…
45° here on the shores of Lake Norman (N. of Charlotte). The sun is peeking through a tad, but we’ve had a quarter-inch of rain in the last 24 hours. The trees that bloom in the spring, mostly junky Bradford Pears, have had their brief moment and turned from white to green. A webcam near our prior home west of Manassas shows about four inches of white ick.
Alaska reporting in. Still a lot of snow on the ground. Here, Groundhog Day is considered a joke and the first day of spring is about daylight, not the ed of snow.
However, Spring is coming so I am eyeing my bike and itching to get out soon.
4th Nor’easter here. The older I get the less I like winter.
That’s from the storm that’s headed towards New England right now. Though as others have said there’s no consistent message about exactly where it’s going to track, and snow totals have been all over for the past couple days: 3 inches to 12 inches then back down to 6 inches. The current forecast for my town is between 4 (1 during the day, 3 at night) and 9 (2 day, 7 night) inches more snow.
And apparently the National Weather Service office in Taunton, MA started moving to a new building yesterday. I guess they planned with spring starting that the weather would settle down a little? HA!
https://www.weather.gov/box/moveday
San Fernando Valley (Los Angeles), no snow here, but rain. Lots and lots of rain!
“So, you piled under snow, too?”
I can’t tell. Sun is too bright to see much here…
At 3:44 PM, we are not under new snow. Yet. “They” say it is still coming. We are, however, still looking at the snow from the last storm which has hung around to welcome the newcoming flakes to the neighborhood. It is to sigh.
4th nor’easter in NJ of March. state of emergency, so far not bad but hours to go before we’re done. Last one left most of the town without power for 4 days. We’re hopeful but cautious!
Weather guy made a funny comment about “blizzard french toast”… everyone flips out and raids the stores for bread, eggs, and milk like it’s the end times. so must be a tradition to have french toast?
Ah, spring in the Midwest. This is the infamous “False Spring” in action.
In Philadelphia, land of the endlessly vacillating snowfall prediction. About they only honest thing they could say was, “Yes, there will be enough snow to be annoying.” We’ve got at least 6 inches now (at 4pm) and it’s expected to snow a bit for another couple of hours. That said, they had been saying it could be upwards of 12″, which clearly isn’t going to happen.
no snow here. of course, it’s florida. if there WERE snow here, it would be making all the news.
I’m a few hours east of you (Pickerington, where you talked at the library a few years back). We got a total of about 2 inches, and by now it’s mostly melted. Tomorrow’s sunshine ought to do it in completely. Quite frankly, I can tolerate snow better when it acts like this.
Not so bad here in Washington, DC. Sidewalk was cleared off quickly and with no a lot of effort. Same for the car. If only all winter snowstorms were like this.
Minnesota transplant in South Carolina here. No snow this time, although we did get some earlier in the season that actually lasted for several days. It is cold(for down here) though. Big rain last night, big wind today. We’ll be fine.
Just rain in sunny Southern California
Suburb west of Chicago- last weekend we had a snowstorm weather watch. Once you’ve lived here you’ve learned to take snow predictions with a grain of salt. Always with the “OMG OMG OMG the snow, masses and masses of snow!!!” And then we get three flakes and that’s it. So my philosophy is I’ll believe it when I see it. At the moment we have green grass, no leaves, and snow predicted for Saturday. we’ll see.
Yuck – you can keep that stuff, thanks, no need to share it.
In the Midwestern flyover state where I live, today is sunny and chilly, with most of the snow gone save for in shaded corners. Friday night and Saturday, however, show a forecast of “rain, rain and snow, snow, snow, rain and snow, rain.” Of course, that’s still 48 hours away and reality could be anything from a few sprinkles of rain to an outright blizzard. Either way, though, I am more than ready for winter to make its final exit for the next eight months or so.
NYC looks pretty bad today too. Nothing like that, at least in the heart of the city, but it’s snowing pretty hard. What a woderful 1st day of Spring…
New Brunswick Canada — end of February was warmish (above freezing) and our 6 foot snow banks were nicely shrinking. Then came March and those 3 nor’easters. We are now bracing for number 4 which is due to hit early tomorrow morning. Even if it turns out to not be as bad as predicted, I expect to be watching snow melt through April.
Western Canada here
Still lots of snow on the ground but its been nice & warm and its melting rapidly
Berkeley CA — no snow, but all the rain we didn’t get 3 months ago.
Lots of rain here in N. California, translating to snow pack in the mountains (thank goodness!).
Regarding snow: there was a lovely G. Keillor monologue many years ago about March in Minnesota. To paraphrase: “March in Minnesota is God’s way of teaching people who don’t drink what a hangover is like.” It really sounds like everyone east of the Rockies is finished and done with winter, but winter is not letting loose.
From the other side of the world (Perth, Western Australia) – we had the hottest day of our year so far (and the hottest day in over twelve months) about a week ago (38.5 C on 13th of March). If we go by the European calendar, we’re in Autumn. Of course, the local indigenous calendar puts us in Bunuru, which is the season of hot dry weather. We still have a category 5 cyclone lurking off the coast, although it’s expected to peak today and decline into a tropical low by the time it crosses the coast (again – it’s already been and annoyed Darwin and the far north Kimberley). But then, we’re in an area with acknowledged climate change, and we’re not expecting our rainy season to really start until about mid-May, if then.
It’s funny, really. When I was a kid, my birthday was generally on a grey, cloudy day, possibly with some light rainfall, and I was often wearing a jumper (sweater, for you ‘mericans) of some kind or a cardigan or similar. As I got older, my birthday started happening more and more on a nice, clear, sunny day. These days, my birthday is sometimes on a day where I need to wear shorts because wearing jeans is too hot. My birthday, of course, hasn’t moved – it’s just that the climate has changed around it. (My birthday is in the first week of April, by the bye).
Oregon, here; we’re supposed to get snow Friday night/early-to-midday Saturday, but even if it comes down, it won’t last. Otherwise just rain and occasional sleet. Cold nights, though. My daughters up in north-central WA will get a pretty fair bit of snow dumped on them Fri & Sat; forecast is even predicting blizzard conditions for a bit.
Then there’s my son. In L.A. Who may have had to wear a jacket today when the temp dipped allllll the way down below 60. Poor thing.
Not snowing here in South Carolina. We do sometimes get snow, but only in January. And usually only one day a year.. We did have a bit of a shock weather-wise. Yesterday’s high was 78F, a fairly common temp for a SC spring. This morning, it was just above 40, heading for a high of 53, with 22mph winds. Nothing nearly as major as the snow, but I’ve lived here in the south for almost 20 years and I’m used to what was ‘normal’ until this year.
I wish. Haven’t had a flake stick all “winter.” This evening at 18:00, the outdoor temperature was 76F. Gonna have to water the weeds pretty soon.
No snow here in north Alabama but there was golf ball sized hail two days ago. And tornadoes in the next county.
Northeastern Ohio here, Akron to be specific. We got 2-3 ” overnight, and it was still snowing pretty hard for the morning commute. It was sunny by 3-4:00, but still cold. Who knows what will happen over the next few days. It’s Ohio, after all.
Here in SW West Virginia, snowed all night, most of today but no accumulation, just barely too warm. Just brown and gray and muddy dog paws.
Interestingly, we traveled through Los Angeles en route to La Paz in Baja California for a week long whale watching cruise with 60 odd other people into that kind of thing earlier in March. It rained that day. Then back to LA after the cruise, it rained again. So two visits to LA, rain on both visits! We visited the big museum founded by fabulously wealthy Mr Getty, which would take a week to see all of.
On a mountain top, with steep hills around burnt bare – heavy rain looks to be a catastrophe out there. Beautiful until the weather comes! I also caught a cold, which is now nearly over.
Oh, and need I remind all you folks in the vicinity of the Great Lakes about the April wrapup blizzard, which may be somewhat reliably counted on to make a mess of things the first half of April. Been there, know this. It’s partly why I left Ohio.
It’s raining in San Francisco which, after a parched February, makes us soggy and happy. That white stuff? I remember that. That’s why I left the midwest a long time ago.
I’m in Indiana so I lived this post yesterday. You are clever and wrote about it. :) Maybe Spring and I can improve our relationship soon… this back and forth thing is getting old.
In the weekend is was 41 c. (So that’s 106?f serious adopt the metric system)
It’s autumn. It should be cooler and more bearable instead I was just a sweaty creep trying to convince the kids that we couldn’t go get ice cream because it was too hot.
We’ve just suffered through our 4th “nor’easter” this month. I have “nor’easter” in quotes because with all of the hype, and you know how t.v. stations like to hysterically hype snowstorms, this one was a bust, in which my town got about two inches of warm snow. In fact, the only “nor’easter” that wasn’t a bust here was the storm of 3/7-3/8, which left about a foot+ throughout most of the state (CT).
Get this. Tokyo had a huge amount of snow on Wednesday. Melted as soon as it hit the ground but we had quite the show. Glad we could sync east and west.
Durham was the same as Tokyo, had a great snow fall and once it hit the ground it was gone!
NW CT here.
Ever since my partner started on chemo every other Wednesday, in a city that’s over an hour drive away on a twisty road over a mountain, we’ve gotten every other Wednesday snowstorms. We’re just happy because it didn’t start till we got back home, and it was only about an inch when they threatened six.
Today it’s lovely weather and I may go for a three and a half mile walk.
In my part of the world, the frozen tundra known as Ottawa, Ontario, the snow that falls in November is normally with us until the end of March. The freeze-your-butt winter temperatures keeps the snow around. db
Welcome to Hoth.
Here in Central NY we are working on busting the snowfall record. More is predicted for the weekend (trace to a few inches) but are still way behind Pennsylvania for total accumulation this winter.
Just south of Indianapolis here. Had an inch of snow on the ground yesterday morning but it all melted by noon as the temps climbed to 50*. Today, so far, is brilliantly sunny and a crisp 28*. Everything that grew a foot in February has now been cold bitten multiple times and seems to have stalled out. Not sure what will actually bloom once the weather levels out. If it does.
Here in ‘alpine’* Victoria Australia it’s been 28c days and 10c nights. Damn near perfect early autumn weather. It hasn’t snowed in the valley either in 30 or so years or never depending on which old timer you ask.
Being from Edmonton Alberta Canada I still boggle at what they call a cold winter’s day here.
“Oh, it’s a cold one you say? I notice you’ve walked here without a hat and your ears are still attached to your head…” is something I often think but rarely say. :)
*When I first got here the said: “That’s Mount Buffalo.”
After a bit of peering and craning I had to ask, “Is it behind the hill…”
There’s lots to love about my adopted home, but the prairie winters and the proximity of the Rockies does jade one a bit.
Downtown Toronto reporting in to say it’s sunny and a little above freezing. We don’t actually get that much snow until you start to move away from downtown and the lake. It’s the opposite of lake effect snow; we typically get a few inches of snow a few times a year, which tends to melt within a couple of weeks.
Every couple of years we do get a heavy snowfall–I don’t ordinarily need to shovel but I bought a snow shovel a few years ago so I could shovel enough snow to get my car parked off of the street car tracks–but it’s not that common.
Central-Western New York is being spared; the remains of the last one are still with us. Every Groundhog day, we WISH it would only last another 6 weeks, but we know better. I enjoy reading the news from Australia, as well as various American spots. I also have in mind a line from a Spenser book, protagonist from Boston, about drifts one and one half inches high in Washington DC and the standstill brought about by them. Irony has survival value.
The Imperial Capital is back to work after a light dusting. Oh, and the new Amazon bookstore in Georgetown just opened. From clicks and mortar back to bricks and mortar. I kid thee not.
When I was a kid living in the Akron-Cleveland area we never assumed that we were out of the woods in regards to snow until April 1st.
we had a few days of sun here in Utah and now it is cold again…I am so ready for warm!
I’m the metro-DC area, we had 3-4 inches yesterday. No school for the kiddies or work for me and my spouse. A nice break all around, but glad to be back to normal.
We should start a friendly competition to see whose local “Mt. PlowPile” lasts the longest this year. Mine should be good to the end of April at least.
Up here in Ontario, where many Americans imagine we live in a perpetual blizzard, we haven’t had any snow since the end of February. It is pretty cool though.
We got a little snow, but now forecasters are predicting snowmageddon for this coming Saturday. Or MAYBE snowmageddon. Some 36 hours before the storm begins, they’re predicting everything from “some rain” to “so much snow we’ll all die.” So it’s a trifle unclear what will happen.
So I’ve been given a heads up that my tours may be canceled. I’ll find out tomorrow. I have a very enjoyable part-time job, typically busiest on Saturdays, as a historical walking tour guide, taking people into 19th century beer-making caverns beneath the city. We never cancel tours, no matter the weather. But the forecast is so ominous, there’s a realistic possibility we’ll cancel all tours this Saturday.
Not piled under it but waaaay too much of it is present.
In Alaska we have snow, plenty of snow, mounds and mountains of snow. Could I interest you in increasing your snow inventory?
Send some snow to Allenspark. We had a couple of inches Monday, but need more to fill up the wells for summer. Colorado.