Weather
By Dan Skeldon
For lovers of those six-sided crystals that usually fall, occasionally fast and furiously, during the winter, it’s been a difficult season so far. It’s the winter of the snow lover’s discontent, not only here in South Jersey but the entire Interstate 95 corridor from Washington to Philadelphia to New York and even Boston.
Not that the South Jersey shore is a “snowbelt” most winters. Sure, we have our moments, like last January, with two blizzards in one month totaling almost three feet of snow. Or then there was the winter of 2009-2010, the snowiest on record, when almost five feet of snow buried the region. Specifically, 58.1 inches of snow was measured for that snowbound winter at the Atlantic City International Airport (ACY) in Egg Harbor Township, the most ever. But it was the exception, not the rule, and still the only winter on record with more than 50 inches of snow.
In fact, we’re three times more likely to get a winter with less than one inch of snow. That happened back in the winter of 1972-73, our least snowy on record, with just a paltry 0.4 inches of snow measured for the season. More recently, the winter of 2019-20 came very close to stealing that title, with just 0.5 inches of total snow. Rounding out the top three least snowy winters was the barren winter of 1994-95, with just 0.8 inches of snow that snow-less season.
For the record, we’ve seen just a “trace” of snow so far this winter. That came with those “surprise” snowflakes on the morning of Saturday, Jan. 14. A trace is a term that recognizes it finally did snow, but it wasn’t enough to measure. Instead, it was just those “conversational” snowflakes, the type that finally got us talking. “Hey, do you believe it’s actually snowing?” “Is winter finally here?” “Will it be enough to cancel school on Monday?”
My answers to those questions, as a disheartened snow lover myself:
1) I didn’t believe it at first since the flakes weren’t forecast. But as it turns out, they were just a tease.
2) No, winter still really isn’t here. If you take out those few days of bitter cold around Christmas and a day or two of cold the first weekend of February, it really hasn’t been much of a winter at all. That’s not changing anytime soon.
3) Unless Monday is a holiday and school is closed anyway, I don’t see any snow days anytime soon. Sorry kids!
So should we raise the white flag? On one hand, we’re just starting the month of February. And climatologically speaking, late January to mid-February is traditionally one of the snowier times of the winter, and a stretch that has produced some monster snowstorms for the shore. And let’s not forget there have been some memorable March monsters over the last decade or so as well. So the optimist would say that there’s still plenty of time left.
But then there’s the other hand, the one against any snow in our immediate future or even farther down the road. And before looking ahead, the pessimist will even look back at December 2022, the month where the stars were aligned and the big picture pattern was primed and a very favorable one to produce blockbuster winter storms. I would have laid down a $100 bet at the Ocean Casino that we would have a big storm given the pattern, if they took weather bets of course. And despite one of the more favorable patterns in recent memory, all we got to show for it was a few days of “wasted” cold and multiple rounds of rain.
Then there was our dominant January pattern, the one sending a parade of Pacific storms into the West Coast, absolutely pummeling California, and in turn flooding the rest of the Lower 48 with mild Pacific air. A lack of snow usually begins with lack of cold, and we certainly were lacking in cold during January, which looks to go down as the second warmest January on record, behind only January 1950. Highs in the 50s, 60s, and even 70-degree record warmth have been more common than below freezing temperatures, which we’ve seen only a handful of nights. And January thunderstorms have been more common than steady snow, another testament to how unwintry this winter has been.
So that atmospheric river that battered the West Coast finally “ran out of water” and gave the West a breather in late January. And yes, we are opening February with a brief but intense shot of arctic air just after Groundhog Day. But now it looks like something called “the southeast ridge”, a large high pressure off the Southeast Coast of the United States, akin to the “Bermuda High” in the summer, will flex its muscle through much of February. If that is indeed the case, then yet another long stretch of warmer than average temperatures will erase the brief shot of cold to open the month, and keep snow chances either minimal or zero for the foreseeable future.
That means South Jersey snow lovers will have to pin their hopes on late February or March, and hope for a more sizable and more sustainable pattern change. Now it only takes one big storm to feed a snow lover’s fix and erase a season long snow deficit. But it also takes a “threading of the needle” for all the storm ingredients to come together just right, especially with the stars so aligned against snow this year.
So sorry snow lovers! Let’s say that I have the white flag strung up on the flagpole and my hands on the ropes ready to hoist it on up. I haven’t started pulling yet, but it may not be long now before that flag is flying. Or maybe we’ll get a first day of spring snowstorm this year, when everyone is ready for spring and even snow lovers aren’t looking to be buried.
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.
