AccuWeather's Spring Outlook Sees Winter Hanging On In Washington

WASHINGTON — With more meteorology than happenstance behind its forecasts, AccuWeather beat the famous groundhog Punxsutawney Phil by about a week with its prediction of six more weeks of winter in the Pacific Northwest.

AccuWeather’s spring weather forecast preview released Wednesday suggests winter will hold on a little longer in about half the country, including Washington.

Meteorological spring starts on March 1, and the spring equinox, which officially starts the season, is on March 20 this year. People in many parts of the country will still be wearing their winter parkas and snow boots if AccuWeather’s predictions hold true.

Early spring could feel like early winter, when bitterly cold Arctic air swept across the eastern two-thirds of the country, sending windchill temperatures far into the sub-zero range.

As the calendar turns from February to March, a polar vortex — a mass of cold air that is tightly bound to polar regions by strong counterclockwise winds known as the polar jet stream — may dive southward across the contiguous U.S., unleashing some of the coldest weather of the season.

The polar vortex is expected to spare people living in the Southeast and Southwest, according to AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Paul Pastelok.

But from February until the start of spring, people in the interior West could keep their heavy coats, hats, scarves and mittens handy as armor against shots of cold air.

Pastelok said that depending on the timing and extent of the cold air, it could be a “very active March” for severe weather. If the Rockies and northern Plains take the first polar vortex hit, “severe weather could be frequent and strong from the Plains to the Tennessee [and] Ohio valleys,” Pastelok explained in a story on AccuWeather.

Spring could bring more rain to the West Coast and California, which has been battered by an onslaught of atmospheric rivers that produced flooding and mudslides that caused at least $1 billion in damage. The storms improved drought conditions in the state and the Colorado River Basin, and more storms could result in more drought relief.

New seasonal outlooks from the Climate Prediction Center show the odds favoring temperatures sticking below average in Washington between February and April. On the precipitation front, climatologists see equal chances for drier or wetter conditions in Western Washington.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration typically releases its official spring outlook in March.