After a very snowy January and a frigid February, winter weary GTA residents had every reason to wonder if there would be any real relief in March.
It turns out there was and it's been something of a rare event.
Monday will be cooler than the weekend with highs of just 6C and a frigid breeze, while Tuesday will recover to 8C, before we hit the first day of April on Wednesday.
We've seen record high temperatures this month, frigid lows and on Sunday, the
22 millimetres of rain that fell at Pearson International Airport broke the existing March 29th mark of 12.2 mm set back in 1951.
But it isn't the rain that's getting the notice, so much as the lack of snow. We generally receive nearly 20 centimetres of winter's worst as the season slowly fades out in this part of Ontario. This year, we got barely 1 cm.
And that's despite a major disturbance that brought some 30 cm to parts of the U.S. last week, with states like Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas getting buried by an early spring blizzard.
And it also hit up north - part of Highway 11 was shut down near Barrie, due to a sudden snow storm there.
The GTA was lucky this time - we stayed on the warm side of that moisture-laden system last week and missed the cottage country trauma on Sunday and Monday. Instead, we wound up getting drenched by rain, avoiding the weather that brought so much misery elsewhere.
The last time we saw that little snow in March in this part of the world was in the record setting warm winter of 2006, when just 0.8 cm fell. It's also close to the 0.3 cm we received in 1953.
To find the all time record low snow for March, you have to go back to 1898, when only a trace amount fell for the entire month at what is now Pearson International.
And things are looking pretty good for April. Highs will stay at or above normal for the first week of the new month, and we could hit double digits some days.
The lowest we'll see overnight is -2C on Thursday but for the most part, temperatures should remain above freezing during the early morning hours.
Although snow is still possible right up through May, the average amount in April is only 5.7 cm. Which hopefully means you can finally put that shovel away for good.
Although you'll want to hang onto that umbrella a bit longer - we normally receive just over 62 mm of rain before April finally gives way to a much drier May.
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