The District broke an almost two-year “snow drought” streak this week, after going more than 700 days without hitting the one-inch mark for snowfall.
Over the course of Monday and Tuesday, more than 4 inches fell, with some parts of the DMV region seeing up to half a foot of snow. Students got an extension to their Martin Luther King Jr. Day long weekend as schools and federal government buildings stayed closed Tuesday.
“It’s been a really long time since they’ve had an actual snow day, you know, between COVID and just having no snow, so this has been a godsend for us,” said Lora Nunn, a Ward 7 resident whose two kids spent Monday and Tuesday playing in the drifts.
The wintry weather struck just a week after a major storm that disappointed snow lovers, breaking records for early January rainfall and causing flooding around the region without a frosty flake in sight. That’s because temperatures that day stayed well above freezing, with a high of nearly 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
“[My kids] have been super bummed about having no snow, and I kept reassuring them that people had promised me that it was going to be a really bad winter,” said Lora Nunn, a mom of two in Ward 7. “But we’ve had all those false alarms like last week with the rainstorm … and you know, my kids kind of had gotten over hoping for it.”
Chesnea Skeen, a meteorologist with NWS Baltimore/Washington, said that the region may see more snow on Friday or Saturday, as a cold front passes through.
“We have a system approaching this weekend, which could start as early as Thursday night, and because we have a cold air mass in place, any precipitation that could fall Friday or Saturday would be most likely in the form of snow,” Skeen said.
What Climate Change Means for Snow Days
King Nunn, Lora’s 7-year-old son, said he didn’t remember the last time there was enough snow for him and his older sister to play in. The siblings spent Tuesday sledding, making snowballs and playing “penguin,” with other kids in their Kingman Park neighborhood. Nunn said it’s been odd missing out on snow days in recent years; as a DMV native, she remembers having at least a couple of snow days each winter when she was a kid.
The planet is steadily warming up because of heat-trapping gasses released from burning fossil fuels. In most of the U.S., winter has warmed up the fastest compared to other seasons. In the District, average winter temperatures have increased by 3.6 degrees since 1970, according to data from Climate Central.
That might not seem like a lot, but those higher averages can cause big changes — among them, fewer snow days like the ones D.C. saw this week.
“Growing up in the Mid-Atlantic, this is kind of a special rite of passage,” Nunn said. “Because we don’t get a ton of snow out here … the two or three good, solid, heavy snows we get [in a season] become a kind of community-building event.”
The National Weather Service calculates “climate normals” for the amount of snow a location can expect based on averages across a 30-year span. D.C.’s baseline has fallen considerably over time. Between 1891 and 1921, D.C. averaged about 24 inches of snow each year. Fast forward a century: between 1991 and 2021, the District saw an average of 13.5 inches of snow.
Counterintuitively, climate change can also increase the chances for intense blizzards—like the “Snowmageddon” event in 2010, which dumped more than 30 inches of snow on the Washington area. That’s because warmer air holds more moisture than cold air.
2023 was the hottest year ever recorded, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed in a report released Jan. 12. Temperatures last year smashed previous records. While much of that heat stems from climate change, other factors — including the start of the recurring natural phenomenon El Niño — also contributed. Since El Niño will continue into 2024, some scientists have warned that this year could potentially be even hotter than last, per New York Times reporting last week.
Seasonal forecasts predicted that the D.C. region would see both slightly above-average temperatures and slightly above-average precipitation this winter, according to the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center. The wetter weather associated with El Niño has led meteorologists to predict a fairly snowy winter this year.
If It’s Getting Warmer … How Come It’s So Cold?
“Climate” and “weather” are different things. A place’s climate is defined by the weather it has, on average, over a long period of time. Weather is a specific event that happens in a given stretch of hours, days or weeks. Knowing a place’s climate helps determine what we might expect the weather to be on a given day, based on what it was in previous years. But—as anyone who has lived in D.C. knows plenty well—weather doesn’t always turn out how one might expect.
“You can think of it as ‘weather is the news, climate is history,’” Skeen said. “Climate is several decades of records, an average of weather events. Weather is what’s happening today or tomorrow.”
So while climate change is making our winters warmer overall, that doesn’t mean snowy days will disappear entirely. They may just get a little fewer and farther between most years.
“It’s been a weird couple of years, not having a snow day,” Nunn said. “So today is really special.”