Edmunds County Tribune -

Weather Summary

The average precip. for December is now .35 making it the driest month of the year along with January. 26 months of December out of 47 had precip. totals around or below .35. What I’m doing in this publication is to pick eight of the other 21 months where the precip. and snow totals were some what higher or odd:

1977: 11 inches of snowpack was passed to December 1977 from November 1977.  This caused problems right away. Month was plagued with 14 more   inches of snow which amounted to .85 and five blizzards of white-out conditions.  17 inches of snow was passed to January 1978.

1993: This was a heavy snowfall December that totaled 14 inches and with a carry-over of 16 inches from November made it a very miserable month – Snowpack never got lower than 13 inches and a carry-over of 16 inches into 1994 – Precip. totals melted down from the 14 inches amounted to .91 and caused several blizzards.

1996: High precip. at .69 from 13 inches of snowfall – Snowpack the entire month ranged from 13 to 18 inches – Three blizzards of note were recorded. (This was the start of one of the worst Januarys on record which was in 1997)

2000: Precip. at .37 with 9 inches of snowfall – The problem though was that this month had a snowpack of 12 inches to start with from November which caused problems all month – Four blizzards of note.

2010: Precip. high at .98 from 21 inches of snow – 15 inches of this carried over into 2011 – One of the worst white-out blizzards ever recorded occurred on the 31st  lasting about 12 hours.

2016: High amount of precip. at 1.14 – Most of this precip. came as just rain (1.18) on Christmas day – Recorded as one of the biggest oddities of weather keeping by me in 47 years – Temp. stayed at 33 to 34° for most of the day time hours.

2019: Precip. high at .94 from 12 inches of snowfall – Snowpack all month from a carry-over from November of 13 inches to 14 inches that carried over into 2020 - Several blizzards occurred this month.

2022: Even though this December isn’t over yet, it is still going to be ranked as one of the worst Decembers regarding snowfall in 47 years – At this writing Ipswich has received around 20 inches of snow which melts down to over one inch of precip. – Some of this has come in the form of freezing rain which are called ice storms - The other problem is the strong NW winds causing numerous blizzards.

(Next week I’ll have the summary for 47 Decembers which will complete this project starting last January.)