As we focus on the thunderstorms and humidity of summer we can finally close the book on winter. Let’s take a look back and then try to forget how cold and lasting this winter was.
SNOW
National Weather Service Cleveland Snowfall Total Map for 2017-2018
This winter the ASOS station at the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport in Vienna, Ohio picked up 89.9 inches of snow this winter.
| November | 1” |
| December | 19” |
| January | 23.1” |
| February | 15” |
| March | 15.2” |
| April | 7.6” |
Looking at the snowfall by month, you can see the only month that lacked snow was February due to the warm up at the end of the month. I’ll talk about that in a second.
Overall, we placed 5th this winter for the snowiest winters on record.
| 2010-11 | 118.7” |
| 2007-08 | 102.8” |
| 2006-07 | 90.2” |
| 2013-14 | 90.1” |
| 2017-18 | 89.9” |
| 2008-09 | 86.5” |
| 1950-51 | 85.3” |
| 1992-93 | 82.3” |
| 1962-63 | 82.0” |
| 2004-05 | 81.2” |
| 1993-94 | 81.0” |
Here is the crazy part of it, 6 of the top ten snowiest winters have been in the last 10 years! So take that grandparents who complained they had it so much worse back then walking uphill both ways in the snow. Your grandkids actually have it worse.
All jokes aside it wasn’t the amount of snow that everyone was talking about, but how long winter lasted. The first trace of snow was on November 9th and the last trace was registered on April 29th. That is a snow season of 171 days long! That’s almost half the year.
Through the winter we had several decent snowfalls. There were nine snow events that measured more than 3 inches of snow at the airport. The highest 24-hour snowfall measured was February 6-7th, coming in with 7.8 inches of snow.
The snow isn’t the only thing that made this winter memorable.
COLD
This winter was also bone-chilling cold. You can’t forget the 14 days consecutive days in December and January we spent below 32 degrees. On Christmas, our high was 31 degrees and we didn’t get above freezing until January 8th. In that stretch, we had lows below freezing several times. Our overall low for this winter was also during this cold snap. On January 7th, we had a low of -11 degrees.
To balance out the cold snap was a warm up in late February. This is the reason there was less snow in February. The average temperature for the month was 35.7 degrees which is the 4th warmest February on record.
However, it doesn’t compare to February of 2017 when we had an average temperature of 38.6 degrees, which is the warmest February on record by almost 2 degrees!
Looking back, we can say this was a rough winter. Hopefully the next few months we can thaw out before we have to do it all over again.
Meteorologist Matt Jones 