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2006-03-20 08:58:26.000 – Jim Salge,  Observer

Predicting six more weeks of winter…

Ah the first day of Spring. Could have fooled me, as the weather refuses to acknowledge this fact! This stagnant pattern again keeps the summits in the fog, and temperatures have dropped below -12F overnight. Windchills this morning sit around -50F, and intermittent snow showers continue to fall. It’s been 5 days since we’ve seen temperatures rise above 3F…making this arguably one of the most wintry stretches that we’ve seen this year.

Which got me thinking and into crunching some numbers…
I really think that the seasons have swapped on Mount Washington this year. After a spectacularly snowy autumn, we have had a winter-long January thaw, complete with four significant RAINSTORMS during the calendar winter. Temperatures for the entire month of January actually averaged 15 degrees, ironically exactly the average temperature for this, the first day of spring, while today we sit near January averages. There were of course bouts of cold, but they were typically short lived, and major snowstorms were nowhere to be found.

Which brings us to our most staggering statistic of the year. Though we have had 278 inches of snow this ‘season’ at the peak of Mount Washington, 158 of it fell outside of calendar winter. Maybe now that winter is over, spring will pick up where autumn left off!!!

The picture at right shows the summit fox out and about on Saturday, quite comfortable despite the COLD weather. So what’s the lore about the fox seeing his shadow???

Jim Salge,  Observer