Weather

Will March Bring More Snow to New England?

Meteorologist Matt Noyes breaks down what the weather has in store for us this month

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For the occasional cold snaps February brought to the Boston area, it simply wasn’t enough to break the influence of the exceptional warmth, like the record 69 degree high temperature on Feb. 23. 

When all was said and done, February came in warmer-than-normal by 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit – a healthy margin, and bucking January’s colder-than-normal performance, but it really was January that was the outlier, marking the only colder-than-normal month for Boston since July of 2021. 

February snowfall totaled 15.3 inches, just slightly above the normal snowfall of 14.4 inches for the month. 

It’s worth noting that not all of New England reflected the same pattern as Boston: Burlington, Vermont, recorded warmer-than-normal high temperatures, but the overnight lows were so much colder than normal that the average monthly temperature was 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit colder than normal – truly what I’d term “near normal.” 

Nonetheless, most of New England ended up warmer-than-normal, similar to Boston. Will the pattern continue in March?

How warm will March be in Boston?

In my monthly forecasts on the first weekday of every month on NBC10 Boston and NECN, I start with temperature. In a warming climate, you’d expect to find warmer-than-normal temperatures much more often than near or below normal, and that’s certainly what we find the majority of the months over the last several years, so a common sense approach is to lean warm unless you have a strong inclination otherwise. 

For March, there’s still some pretty impressive cold bottled up in Canada and sitting very close to the U.S. border – while this cold successfully charged into New England in January, it simply wasn’t enough to get the job done in February and with signals for March looking even less impressive for southern incursions of cold than February did, I see no reason to lean cold this coming month. 

The story is different, in my opinion, across the Northern Tier of the Central and Western United States, where an active but relatively flat and fast flow of Pacific storms will likely drag some of the Canadian cold southward with each passage, but in the Eastern United States, the warmth building under a high pressure ridge off the Southeast U.S. coast will likely just be too strong to be overcome. This should not only set up a pattern of relative warmth over the Southeastern third of the nation, but allow that warmth to bleed northward up the Eastern Seaboard, perhaps nudging far southern New England into warmer-than-normal territory with near-normal temperatures farther north and perhaps the best chance of recording colder-than-normal conditions found in the Crown of Maine, though confidence is limited in that solution.

Will March be a stormy month in New England?

Temperature is often closely linked to the jet stream – the fast river of air high in the sky that flows between cold air to the north and warmth to the south – but, of course, the jet stream is critically important for precipitation, too, as it steers storm systems that determine the rain and snow pattern across the country. The part of the jet stream forecast I’m most confident in is the steady flow of Pacific storms into the northwestern United States, meaning wetter-than-normal conditions there. 

Even thereafter, though, it seems very likely we’d find blossoming precipitation in the Ohio and Tennessee River Valleys as the energy unloads east and has the opportunity to pick up Gulf of Mexico moisture, when available. This would do two things: the counterclockwise flow of air around the storm centers would further encourage warmth to ride up the Eastern Seaboard in line with the temperature forecast, and moisture would stream northward with it, with the heaviest precipitation on the northern edge of warmth where it clashes with lingering cool air in the Northeast, and the forecast area of above-normal precipitation follows this pattern. 

Is Massachusetts looking at more snow in March?

Snow is the wildcard: in this pattern, rain would certainly be more likely, but knowing there’s ample cold in Canada, the Gulf of Mexico will open with warmth and moisture on occasion and a steady stream of energetic disturbances will flow in from the Pacific.

Coupled with the tendency in a changing climate over the last few years to favor powerful March storms capable of swaths of very heavy snow, one would be foolhardy to discount that potential this month. 

So while the pattern favors more rain events than snow events, I can tell you our First Alert Team will respect the trend of the last several years and have our guard up for stronger storm indications as we develop our 10-day forecasts in the month ahead.

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