Most of us, including me, are happy to see that spring started at 11:15 today (March 20). But as we saw, that doesn't guarantee a big warmup right away... nor that we will stay warm when it finally happens. Remember, spring is a battleground between winter and summer. We will get a sampling of both over the next 3 months.
If you want your plants to survive into the summer, it's still too early to plant the outside garden.
Since we started keeping records in 1871, our last 32-degree reading, on average, happens April 18th in Omaha. That's still about a month away!
The earliest our last freeze arrived was on March 21st, which happened in 1925. The latest our last freeze happened was on May 13th, which happened in 1997.
We may not even be done with accumulating snow! Since records began in Omaha, the average last time we see an accumulation of at least 0.1 inches of snow happens on March 29th. That isn't too far away, but it has happened as late as May 9th, back in 1945.
As of the the first day of spring, we are still running below average for snow at Eppley Airfield.
Our snow total at the airport is still at 15.5 inches for the season. We average 24.3 inches up until now, so we are 8.8 inches below average. While that is low, we were only at 11.4 inches at this same time last year.
