Earth 365: What happened to Pittsburgh's winter?
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — Earth Day is this Saturday, but CBS News and KDKA-TV are committed to covering stories about the earth 365 days a year.
Every night this week on KDKA-TV News at 6, the KDKA First Alert Weather team is highlighting different topics, related to our local climate and environment.
Up first: the weird winter we had.
Our winter this year was basically non-existent. We had one really cold stretch of weather right around Christmas, but that was pretty much it.
This winter season was the eighth warmest on record and the twelfth least snowy on record. You have to go all the way back to 1948 to find the last time we were that warm and had that little snow in a winter season.
So what happened?
In KDKA First Alert Meteorologist Ron Smiley's opinion, one of the major drivers of our winter season was a powerful ridge of high pressure off the East Coast.
It's always persistent and, in academia, it's called the Bermuda-Azores high. Ron highlighted it when doing our annual winter weather forecast last November as something to keep a close eye on over the winter.
He believes a stronger than normal high sitting off the East Coast didn't allow the easy intrusion of cold arctic air to penetrate south.
Through the end of March, we were almost exactly normal when it came to how much precipitation we had seen, but it was simply too warm for most of it to fall as snow.
Ron says this past winter will likely end up being an outlier. He thinks we'll still see winters more in line with what we associate with a western Pennsylvania winter over the coming years and decades.
But he says we probably won't have to wait another 75 years to see a repeat of this past winter's weather, based on where forecasts and science say we're heading as it relates to climate change.
Our "Earth 365" series continues Tuesday at 6 p.m. when KDKA First Alert Meteorologist Mary Ours takes a look at how the unusual winter is impacting local crops and farmers.