Weather
By Dan Skeldon
South Jersey weather can always be wild, any month, any season. From winter’s nor’easters to summer’s severe storms to tropical systems in the fall, our fickle weather always keeps us on our toes.
But there’s no month quite like March in terms of variety and volatility. It’s the time of the year when seasons clash, and sometimes violently. It’s the time when winter desperately tries to keep control, all the while spring makes repeated attempts at a coup that will of course ultimately be successful. It’s the time when we’re sometimes teased with a 70-something-degree spring fling one day, only to be rudely awakened by several inches of snow just 24 to 48 hours later.
Yes, there’s March Madness, the college basketball tournament known for its Cinderella stories and wild finishes each year. And then there’s meteorological March madness, which can often be just as crazy and unpredictable. I always take off the first weekend of the basketball tournament each year, as there are no better four days in all of sports, at least in my mind. But I seldom have the chance or the desire to take days off from forecasting the fun yet frustratingly fickle March weather.
Just look at the extremes March can bring. At its hottest, temperatures can soar well into the 80s, with an all-time March high temperature of 87 degrees at the Atlantic City International Airport (ACY). And with the effects of climate change, summer-like warmth has become more common this early in the year. We’ve hit 80 degrees on 16 separate occasions during March, and 5 have been since the year 2000. That includes the earliest ever 80-degree day on record in South Jersey, back on March 10, 2016, and an 83-degree high on the first day of spring in 2020.
And then there’s the colder side of March, when lows dip close to zero degrees and wind chills drop below zero. Single digit lows have been recorded 10 times in March at ACY, with the coldest ever March temperature a bone-chilling 2 degrees, set back on March 3, 2014. And while unseasonably warm weather during March has been a calling card of climate change, colder and snowier March weather has oddly been as well. Of those 10 single digit lows, half of them have occurred in the last 15 years
Do the quick math between those warm and cold extremes, and you come up with an impressive 85 degree spread! That’s a contrast that only March can offer and sometimes just days apart.
And then there’s the snow, especially lately. Historically, March is not traditionally a snowy month in South Jersey. Many years, the month brings little to no measurable snow. But over the last 10 years, that has changed. In 2014, major snowstorms on both St. Patrick’s Day -and- a week later, one week into spring no less, dropped sizable spring snows on all of South Jersey. In 2018 in a cruel twist of fate, Mother Nature dumped a half foot of snow on the first day of spring itself. There’s been a handful of winters of late when March ended up the snowiest month of the “winter”, even if some of that snow fell into the start of spring.
So clearly, March has wild variability. But in addition, it has the capability to swing so wildly in such a short period of time. Sometimes, it takes only days, and in an extreme case, less than a day to go from spring warmth and sunshine to bitter winter cold and steady snow. This past week offered up a great example of that volatility. Record warmth was swept away by a squall line of gusty downpours, which was then followed by several opportunities for either a cold rain or some wet snow, all in the span of a few days.
Despite our changing climate, March is still thankfully too early for tropical storms and hurricanes, and hopefully that never changes. But it’s still the nor’easter season, and some memorable March storms fill the history books. The two most memorable are likely the Ash Wednesday storm of 1962, and the Superstorm of 1993.
So as you fill out those tournament brackets this month and try to predict the unexpected, remember meteorologists are doing just that all month long. The tug-of-war between winter and spring rages on, as we wait to see just how many more tugs winter has left.
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.
