Tim's Weather World: Little snow, little ice, and not much winter either

We now have more confirmation that this winter has been a warm one, relatively speaking.   The National Climatic Data Center and NOAA has crunched the numbers and this past January was the 4th warmest on record (going back to 1895) for the lower 48 states. The two-month period of December and January was the fourth warmest on record with an average temperature 3.8° above average. According to Illinois State Climatologist Jim Angel, this was the 6th warmest January for Illinois on record with an average temperature of 33.4°.

Hard to get too cold when there isn't much snow on the ground as has often been the case this winter.  Only 25.5% of the lower 48 has snow cover with an average depth of 3.1".   Last year at this time we had nearly twice as much snow cover with 48.9% of the lower 48 reporting snow on the ground with an average depth of 7.4".  So a lot more snow cover in 2011 and nearly twice as deep on average. Here is a quote from NOAA- "According to data from the Rutgers Global Snow Lab, the average snow extent during January was 1.0 million square miles, which was 329,000 square miles below the 1981-2010 average. This marks the 3rd smallest January snow cover extent in the 46-year period of record."

The image above is from the National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center and its shows the snow cover as of yesterday. Not only is there a lack of snow cover around the midwest but there is also a lack of ice on the Great Lakes.  The Wilmington, Ohio National Weather Service office has a nice summary on the ice (or lack of it) on the lakes. They have posted stunning satellite images from NASA polar orbiting satellites equipped with special observing instrumentation known as MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer).

The image above shows a lack of ice on Lake Michigan.  The only ice that is clearly visible is in Green Bay.

Lake Erie is normally covered with ice by this point in winter because of its relatively shallow depth.  The image above shows only patchy ice in the western part of the lake.