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March: a wet and snowy month
Most of last month’s snow fell on three days.
YOUNGSTOWN — It wasn’t your imagination — March was a very wet and snowy month.
In terms of precipitation, this past month was the wettest March on record in the Mahoning Valley. The area had 6.38 inches of precipitation last month, breaking the March record of 6.2 inches set in 1964.
The Valley also recorded 21.7 inches of snow, the fourth-most for a March, according to National Weather Service records, which date to 1943.
Most of that snow fell on three days:
U6.2 inches March 7;
U5.4 inches March 8; and
U4.3 inches March 22.
“We had a month with a lot of rain and a lot of snow accumulations,” said Martin Thompson, of the weather service in Cleveland.
There were also some drastic changes in the weather last month, he said.
For example, the month’s high temperature was 64 degrees on March 3, and the low was 11 degrees only six days later.
“March can have varying weather, and we saw that,” he said. “April can do that too.”
With the 21.7 inches of snow in March, this is the most snow to fall in a winter season in the Valley.
The area had 102.4 inches of snow for the 2007-08 winter season through March. The old record was last winter when 90.2 inches of snow fell.
And we may not be done yet.
Though the average snowfall in the area for April is 2.2 inches, 14 inches fell in April 2007.
The weather service measures precipitation using a rain gauge at the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport in Vienna.
Rainfall is a straight measurement; an inch of rain equals an inch of precipitation.
Snow is considerably less moist than rain so the weather service considers about 10 inches of snow to equal 1 inch of precipitation.
skolnick@vindy.com