While southern California residents recovered from a record-breaking 84 inches of snow, New York City residents waited patiently for the coast-to-coast storm to interrupt the city’s uncharacteristically mild winter. Just earlier this month, New York City saw its first snowfall of the season, the latest recorded first snowfall the city has seen in over 50 years.
Beginning Monday night, February 27, snow fell over New York for about eight hours, covering the city in roughly 1-2 inches of accumulated snow by the morning of February 28. Residents woke to rainy conditions and icy roads, limiting Tuesday morning commutes.
Two days before the first of March, the flurries stretched across the mid and northeastern states in a subdued version of the storm that shook up the west coast a few days earlier. Towns from Washington DC to Maine accumulated 6 inches at most, a stark difference from the blizzard conditions that shut down Los Angeles and other nearby towns in the valleys of California’s hills and mountains.
The dichotomy of the storm on the two coasts is not the only surprising weather pattern brought by this national winter storm. In correlation with the storm, the National Weather Service (NWS) also reported record-high temperatures from the upper midwest to the southeast.
According to the NWS’s "Mean Max Temp Anomaly Forecast Map," only a small stretch of the middle of the country maintained typical temperatures in response to this storm. The rest of the continental United States is predicted to deal with weather anomalies leading into the first week of March.
A number of factors contribute to abnormal winter weather patterns outside of climate change, and New York meteorologist Brian Ciemnecki encourages residents not to panic. In a statement published in the New York Times, Ciemnecki remarked, "If we were not getting precipitation, this would be a different story, because then we’d be talking about drought."
Luckily, New York has received an average amount of precipitation, simply in the form of rainfall, as the cold air has lingered farther north for the majority of the 2022–2023 winter. Though Monday’s snowfall marked an unwelcome winter anomaly for some NYC residents, others took to the parks to enjoy what might be this season’s only significant storm.
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