2015 Snow Recap

It should not come as a surprise that globally, 2015 has been declared the warmest year on record. Despite a relatively mild summer in the Twin Cities, we are certainly not an exception to this. The month of November started out with temperatures in the 70's and did not fall below freezing until the 20th of the month. In fact the weather was so mild, we were out laying sod the day before Thanksgiving. Overall, we averaged 7.6 degrees above normal. The weather did finally turn and after several significant rain events, we got our first official 1.3 inches of snow on the 26th of the month with another 3.8 inches on 30th. If all of the 4.52 inches of rain that we got had been snow, we would have had over 4 feet by the end of November.

The warm trend continued into December and we were on average over 10 degrees warmer than normal. This led to more rain for the month than snow and with some extreme temperatures fluctuations, freezing rain and sleet became a significant problem. Despite only 9.5 inches of snow, we were over 1 inch above normal for total precipitation. Last year both December and January were above average for temperature until the bottom dropped out in February.