Where the heck is winter?
February 2006 did not make it into the record books; but, at least at my house, it didn’t miss by much in a couple of categories.
The average temperature of 30.5° this February was 3.5° above normal, but almost a degree shy of the 20th warmest February (31.4° in 1987).
Snowfall came within a smidge of making it the 20th least snowy February. That record still belongs to 1946, when only 3.3" fell, compared to the 3.35" that fell this year. Still, we had less than half our normal snowfall for the second straight month. How depressing.
Unlike January, the warmth did not bring an abundance of moisture, and this February saw 0.55" less precipitation than normal (1.39" compared to 1.94").
The official statistics for February 2006 at the Fort Wayne International Airport show an average temperature of 29.8°, 4.8" snow, and 1.64" precipitation.
The high temperature for the month, 59.0° (on the 16th) came within 3 degrees of a daily record (the closest we came to any daily record highs). More interestingly, that high came only three days before the low temperature for the month, 3.4° (on the 19th), which is also the coldest reading so far in 2006 (we didn’t even get below 20 in January!).
Will we ever see above normal snowfall this winter? or at least normal snowfall?
By the way, today (6 March) it snowed moderately several times; but never managed to completely cover the warm ground. We woke to about 85% snow cover (of less than ¼"); and though we had a couple of one to two hour periods of moderate snowfall, the snow cover remained steady until mid-afternoon when the snow turned to rain before the clouds began to break just before sunset. By evening, less than 30% cover (and still less than ¼").
awc 2006-03-06 23:05
|  IN-AL-99 |
