Community Corner

Your 'Reward' for all that Shoveling? Metro Detroit Has Snowiest Winter on Record

Don't pack away your winter gear just yet. The "snow year" doesn't end – yikes! – until June 30.

Here’s a story to tell your future grandkids when you’re sharing tales of misery from the winter of 2013-2014: It was the snowiest on record in metro Detroit.

Snow has piled up to the tune of 94.8 inches (so far). Overnight snowfall of 3.1 inches measured at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport shattered the old record, set more than than 130 years ago, of 93.6 inches, the National Weather Service said.

That was back in the winter of 1880-81, though there's no one around to remember it.

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This year’s record snowfall total is more than twice the amount of snow the Detroit metro area gets in a “normal” winter – 42.5 inches, the National Weather Service says.

And talk about making summertime lemonade out of those metaphorical lemons that fell, incessantly it seems, from the skies over Michigan for the past few months:

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“I guess we could just see it as a reward for all of us after going through this winter," Bryan Tilley, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s White Lake Township station, told  the Detroit News.

The snow came after a day of see-saw weather. Temperatures saw a rapid swing from the 70s to below freezing by Tuesday morning. The snowfall record was shattered at a time when about 28,000 DTE Energy clients were without power after high winds toppled trees and downed power lines.

That includes about 15,000 customers in Oakland County, 2,000 in Macomb County, and 5,000 in Wayne County, with the remainder scattered around the metro area. DTE Energy crews are getting help from utility workers in Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin to retore power – they hope before nightfall, when the area will be flirting with breaking another record.

The record low for this date is 17 degrees, set in 1875, and temperatures could dip below that with a forecast of a low around 21 degrees.

So don’t put away your Mitten State mittens just yet.

“Cold and warm weather go back and forth in April, so there’s still a chance we could see more snow this month.”

A record was also set in Flint, where 83.6 inches of snow fell during the winter, the Detroit Free Press said. The previous record of 82.9 inches was set during the winter of 1974-75. A normal winter in Flint brings 47.4 inches of snow.

It seems almost cruel to mention this:

Though winter officially ended with the Spring Equinox on March 20, the “snow year” doesn’t end until June 30.

Oy.


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