Minnesota’s winter that wasn’t, in charts

There’s not much to love about March in the north.

While leaves pop and flowers bloom in much of the rest of the country, March in Minnesota is kind of like winter’s dreary hangover: The hopes and hints of spring are mostly belied by the cold, snow and wind that remain. 

And if it feels like March this year has dragged on forever, that’s because it has, climatologically speaking: The statewide average winter temperature this year was more akin to that of a typical Minnesota March.

From December through February, the average temp was about 25 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s close to 15 degrees warmer than the 20th century average, and identical to the average March temperature over the same timeframe. 

That’s right: December? It was actually March. January was also March. So was February. Instead of winter, we got three months of March, followed by the actual March, making four months total. Will we get another March in April? Stay tuned!

The sheer size of the anomaly is difficult to overstate. We’re not just talking about a day or a week or a month of unusual temperatures, but an entire meteorological season. We should note, however, that while this winter was the warmest in well over a century of modern data, it’s likely that the winter of 1877-1878, another big El Nino year, was even warmer than this one.

Minnesota stands alone among the states in the Marchiness of this year’s winter, with the El Nino-driven temperature anomaly driving it all sitting squarely over the northern tier of the state. While virtually every county in the country had a warmer-than-usual winter, nowhere was it warmer than here.

Of the 25 counties with the biggest winter temperature anomalies, 24 were located in Minnesota (the 25th was just across the Red River Valley in North Dakota). Lake of the Woods County takes home the trophy for Most Anomalously Warm Winter, clocking in at 17 degrees warmer than usual. 

Only one locale – Alabama’s Geneva County – registered a colder than usual winter, coming in at 0.2 degrees cooler than average. Nearly 500 counties, on the other hand, posted their warmest winters in nearly 130 years of NOAA data.

It’s not just Minnesota or the United States, either: the entire planet is currently heating up at a pace so unexpected it’s got climate scientists worried that their models are already out of date. 

“For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale,” wrote climatologist Gavin Schmidt in a recent column in Nature. “A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, but this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations.”

Who knows: One day we may all look back on the Winter That Wasn’t of 2024 as a harbinger of Minnesota’s climate future: Less ice. Less snow. 

More March.