Is Detroit done with snow this winter?
This winter in Detroit has been cold with snow on occasion but we haven't really seen a big system, yet. But are we possibly already done with snow?
Probably not. In fact, almost certainly not. But when I dig into the numbers and look at the long term forecast, I can't help but wonder that it's possible we may have already filled our snow bucket for the season.
Many people this year have been saying, "This winter has been so easy". For the most part, they're right. Temperatures have been milder than average and it sure seems like there hasn't been that much snow. The data even backs this up... to some extent.
So far this year we've had 30 inches of snow, which is more than the average amount for the first week of February. On average, we're typically staring at 23 inches of snow by this time of year.
This is way more than last year (when we had an abnormally "easy" winter - with 10.1 inches) but way less than the Polar Vortex winter of 2013-2014 when we had more than 66 inches of snow on the ground (isn't that just fun to reminisce about?).
Numbers however can be deceiving.
When I dig into the stats I noticed that most of the snow this year came on December 11, when a storm dumped 10.6" at the airport. If you take that storm out of the mix, we're only at 19.5"... which is not a lot of snow at all and is below average, for this time of year.
The question you all want to know: are we expecting any more?
We will undoubtedly see more snow this season, but probably not for a couple weeks. Things look snow-less for a little while but we do typically see about 8 more inches of snow in February, 7 inches on average in March and another 2 in April.
Will we tack on that additional 17" of snow? Probably not that much, but don't ever rule it out.
As for the warmer temperatures...warmer weather is coming.