Weather
By Dan Skeldon
A year that started with a January designed for snow lovers is fittingly ending on a wintry note as well, with some bitter cold and an arctic invasion that will make for a Top 10 coldest Christmas this year. But in between these wintry goalposts, there was a lot of other eventful weather with a less wintry flair, from droughts to coastal storms to remnants of once powerful hurricanes. Mother Nature seldom gives us a “year off” from noteworthy weather, and 2022 was no exception…
JANUARY: The year started off with a bang, well actually two bangs. Back-to-back blizzards on January 3rd and January 29th each delivered over a foot of snow to the shore, and set up the snowiest January on record in South Jersey! And quite impressively, over 99% of our snow for the entire winter came during the month of January. Several arctic blasts also provided short-lived shots of bitter cold, with the month as a whole running about 4 degrees colder than average.
FEBRUARY: An unexceptional month, with just a thin coating of snow during what is normally our snowiest month of the winter. Temperatures weren’t that far off from average overall, but we did have a one-day warm surge that brought 70-something-degree warmth our way on February 23, tying a record high of 72 degrees at the Atlantic City International Airport (ACY). Of course, we tied with February 23, 2017, and that February saw six record highs and was our warmest ever!
MARCH: While March can and recently has been a fickle month, March 2022 wasn’t as wild and crazy. March has become a magnet for Northeast snow over the last decade, but that wasn’t the case this year, with just a trace of snow observed. We did see an early spring of sorts with record warmth into the 70s on back-to-back days on March 6-7, followed by an extended stretch of consistently warmer than average temperatures through the middle of the month. The groundhog actually said six more weeks of winter, so he, like most meteorologists, had a bad forecast. It happens to the best of us. A strong storm brought a soaking rain for the first week of spring, with a few inches of rain spread out over a few days on March 23-24. The month overall ran about three degrees warmer than average.
APRIL AND MAY: Our South Jersey spring had plenty of April showers, which led to some great May flowers, with no signs as of yet that a drought would develop later in the summer. Rainfall for both months was above average, with temperatures pretty on par with average in April, followed by May running a little warmer than normal. We soaked up our first 80-degree day of the year on April 14, right on target as mid-April is when we normally expect our first foray into the 80s. Minus our two January blizzards, it was a quiet late winter and spring regarding coastal storms, until early May. A slow moving storm brought strong winds and heavy rain our way, with several inches of rain and 60+mph wind gusts along the coast. While May is late in the season for a coastal storm, they do occasionally happen, the strongest being the Mother’s Day weekend storm back in 2008.
SUMMER OF 2022: We snuck in a couple of 90° days in late May, and then a couple more in June. So the heat started slowly this year, but then we jumped right into the frying pan in July and August, with almost half of the days each month soaring past 90-degrees, often accompanied by high humidity naturally. We ended up with the fifth warmest July and fourth warmest August on record in South Jersey. Most of our rain came from hit-or-miss summertime thunderstorms, which hit some areas hard and largely missed others, which was in retrospect the start of a dry spell that morphed into a drought. For example, ACY had 3-4 inches of rain on July 25, and another 3-4 inches of rain on August 28, but very little in between. In many cases, it was drought or deluge.
FALL OF 2022: Hurricane season spared South Jersey any direct hits, but the remnants of what was once powerful Hurricane Ian (which devastated parts of southwest Florida) was the highlight of our September and October weather. Ian’s remnants came up the coast in early October, dropping 4 to 8 inches of drought-busting rain over much of New Jersey. While most of the area (and the state) was in a moderate or even severe drought due to persistent dryness from late summer through early fall, much of that was erased due to average rainfall in September and record October rain. In fact, October 2022 ranked as the fourth wettest October on record.
END OF 2022: I guess you could say 2022 is the year that came in like a polar bear with our two January blizzards, and it will go out like a polar bear with our Christmas weekend arctic invasion. With a very favorable pattern I’ve written extensively about in recent columns, it could have been a “December to remember” for snow lovers. But while much of the country got sizable snows, we come out of this perfect setup for snow with nothing to show for it, except the bitter cold and gusty winds for Christmas weekend. If you’re not one for the cold though, there’s an equally impressive warming trend which starts after the holiday and peaks around or just after the New Year.
Here’s forecasting you and yours a very happy and healthy holiday season!
Meteorologist Dan Skeldon has a degree in meteorology from Cornell University. He has forecasted the weather in South Jersey for the last 18 years, first on the former television station NBC40 and then on Longport Media radio. Dan has earned the American Meteorological Society Seal of Approval for Broadcast Meteorologists, and now does television broadcasts on WFMZ-TV in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley.
