Weather Office says rain, snow not unusual

  • Published
  • By Will Alexander
  • 452nd Air Mobility Wing/Public Affairs
MARCH AIR RESERVE BASE, CALIF. --  A snowman at March ARB? Yep. A few Main Gate guards quickly built it from snow given to them by a couple of contractors entering the base on Dec. 19. 

Staff Sgt. Cassieopia Lucas and Staff Sgt. Thomas "T" Green said that the contractors told them that they live in the mountains where it snowed. Lots of the white stuff ended up in the bed of the truck, and the guards asked for a few handfuls to build a small snowman before waving them through. 

The recent cold spell may ensure a decent life for the snowman, if he can weather the anticipated highs. 

Temperatures dropped between the high 20s and low 30s the day he was built and rose no higher than the mid-50s, according to Mark Ditter, weather supervisor at March ARB's Weather Station Office. 

Ditter said the cold and rain we're getting these days is not unusual. 

"The cold's coming down from the Gulf of Alaska - from where we call the Polar (Front) Jet," he said. "It's streaming in this cold weather, and that's what's bringing in these systems one after another to bring the rain. 

"But this is not unusual," said Ditter. "Honestly, we haven't had normal winter weather for several years - this is more of the normal for us. We're supposed to get heavy rain during December, January, and February, and we're supposed to get some cold weather in here." 

Ditter said that although we're in a very wet cycle, we're still about 3 inches below the normal rainfall for the year because, outside of November, we really haven't had a decent rain since May 22, the day the tornado hit the Riverside area. March averages about 1.4 inches, but we're now 1.25 inches above that because 2.65 inches have fallen so far in December alone, according to Ditter.  January, so far, was the wettest month at 2.74 inches.

"For us, to get snow here on the airfield is normal in the winter," he said. "When we had rain the other night, one of my co-coworkers on the evening shift said he looked out and there was snow mixed in with that rain here at the airfield. We get snow here; it's normal. In December, January and February, our climatological models show a trace of snow here on the airfield every winter." 

Since a "trace of snow" could never amount to enough to build a snowman, we just may have seen the first snowman ever to be built on March.