Taking a look back at March’s weather

As April begins, the March weather story has come to an end. You'll want to take a look back at the weather we saw in March because looking back at a month’s weather can be almost as interesting as looking forward to what’s coming next. 

You may be familiar with the Climate Prediction Center outlooks that we show when we near the beginning of each new month. These outlooks give us guidance as to what temperatures and amounts of precipitation we can expect to see. The CPC hit the temperature outlooks right on the nail as we spent the majority of March warmer than average. The precipitation outlook was a little reserved as we actually saw more rain than average for last month. Interestingly enough, we saw almost half of the month’s rain on St. Patrick’s Day! Without that one day rainfall accumulation, we would’ve been right on par with the climatic average for March.

Last month showed us that CPC outlooks can be useful tools for forecasting, but they’re not always fully correct as one day can impact how a month compares climatically against past years.