But..
They are.
The normal high for parts of the United States pales in comparison to what the actual temperature is. Temps about thirty degrees above normal is commonplace this March.. while it has been spring only for mere hours, the actual temperature has been springlike if not downright summerlike throughout vast portions of the United States. Records have fallen.. tornadoes struck in what should have been the dead of winter.. no snow melt because of no snow.. white Christmases were few and far between. This year has been ...well, if you think about it, frightful!
Common Dreams has a good collection of links about this odd weather we are all experiencing. The amount of 70s and 80s this time in March is strange. It has been seen before.. but so many days in a row? So warm.. so humid? So thick of atmosphere..? Common Dreams quoted Jess Masters of Weather Underground.. this comment perhaps sums up this odd winter/spring heat the best:
As I stepped out of my front door into the pre-dawn darkness I braced myself for the cold shock of a mid-March morning. It didn't come. A warm, murky atmosphere, with temperatures in the upper fifties — 30 degrees above normal – greeted me instead. Continuous flashes of heat lightning lit up the horizon, as the atmosphere crackled with the energy of distant thunderstorms. I looked up at the hazy stars above me, flashing in and out of sight as lightning lit up the sky, and thought, this is not the atmosphere I grew up with.
Not the weather any of us grew up with... at all. Is this the new norm? Have earth changes so accelerated that winter is gone? Or was La Nina so strong that it was meant to be a snowless and coldness winter?
Accuweather's Henry Margusity wrote this:
The only snow cover east of the Rockies is across northern Maine. I have not seen snow gone so early in 25 yrs of Forecasting
25 years isn't much in the grand scheme of things. But in our lifetime? Pretty important stuff...
If it's 80 in March.. I dread what July will be..........