CHARLOTTE, N.C. — This winter has felt long and certainly has been wet. But compared to the last 2 winters, its hard to believe that his one has been tamer than you would think. Lets take a look at the numbers.
In Meteorology, Winter records are classified as December, January and February, so winter 2020-2021 is almost over in the meteorology world.
The last couple of Winters have been extremely wet.
2018-2019 was the 6th wettest on record. (17.52")
2019-2020 was the 14th wettest on record. (15.89")
This Winter as of the morning of February 26th is only the 63rd wettest on record. And even with rain over the weekend we won’t likely crack the top 50.
The reason why we are so low on the list is because of the lack of BIG rains.
This Winter has NOT had a day where more than an inch of rain has fallen!
The wettest day was February 15th where Charlotte saw 0.82” total.
Meanwhile the last two winters had a rain of event of over an inch happen at least once every month.
Including last February we had over 3” of rain fall on the 6th. Which is the most ever to fall in one day during that month.
Well what about frequency? Has it rained more days this Winter?
The answer… its been comparable.
Breaking it down per month. We had 7 days of measurable rain (or 0.01” or more) in December. This is far less than the last 2 years. Where December 2020 was just the 87th wettest on record. This put us behind.
But we did see measurable rain 15 days in January and will likely finish out February with 16 total.
SO overall the amount of “wet” days has been similar BUT we have seen more precipitation to end winter, raining about half the days in January and February… making it feel like this winter has been overly wet.
Lastly, taking a look at snow. The last 2 winters have been well below normal. Only seeing 0.3” accumulate this and last. Going forward even though many more wet days are ahead of us for Spring at least we will start to further ourselves from that miserable cold rain we have seen too much of.
