Fetch the sunglasses and the cocoa butter, it’s Ground Hog Day…
Not just any Ground Hog Day, mind you, this one’s likely to go into the record books in the most benign winter in KC ever.
So says KSHB weather wonk Gary Lezak.
"Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, so that means he goes back inside and we have six more weeks of winter," Lezak says. "So what we’ve been doing already for six more weeks."
What "we’ve been doing already" is scampering about in sweaters and light jackets and celebrating astonishingly low heating bills. What we’ve not been doing is buying driveway melt, winter coats, snowblowers and so forth.
And while that could change, don’t hold your breath, Lezak says.
"It might snow Saturday night or Sunday morning," he says. "But then after Saturday night and Sunday morning, there’s nothing.
"It’s going to rain all day tomorrow a whole bunch – we’ll probably set a record for rainfall tomorrow – with one to two inches and a chance of three inches of rain."
As for our all-time low snowfall of 4.5 inches, think of it as a record about to be broken.
"It is now the record least amount of snow between December 1st and now," Lezak says. "There’s never been a season with less snow than we’ve had so far in 130 years of record keeping.
"This is ridiculous. But I’m not bummed, I’m baffled. This is absolutely baffling, when we had two of the five snowiest winters last year and the year before, followed by the least snowiest winter ever. And it’s not just in Kansas City, it’s everywhere all across the United States with a couple of exceptions – Denver and Boulder, Soutwest Texas and Seattle. Other than those the rest of the nation is way below average on snowfall."
The unthinkable, awful truth:
"If it continues," Lezak says, "it will be the first winter in Kansas City that you couldn’t make a snowman."
Didn’t he pretty much guarantee that we’d get at least 4 inches of snow in your last story of him?
I don’t think there were any guarantees, but he felt like we still had a long way to go and pointed to two systems that could have delivered the goods. What we got instead was rain and warm weather.
He did note that we needed 4.1 inches to hit the lowest ever and we still need 4.1 inches
Looks Like Warmest Winter in KC History
Its Feb and no snow at all….I’m thinking we get maybe none…or at most a dusting….yet it has not to this point put more people out to entertainment places like we all would think…in my talks with many restaurants and clubs, biz is only up s shade from last year…which was a bad winter….economy and fear still keep folks at home on most weeknights…I have seen a lift on Saturdays around town, but only on Saturdays…hoping it hits bigger as we move forward….but hey I’m sure glad…NO SNOW…it hurts almost all business…so yeah, lets keep it rolling..
True but “history” in this case is only 130 years, for all we know KC’s entire history could have occurred during a weather anomoly. I’d rather have KC get no snow than go back to the days when the entire region was covered with glaciers.
Fuck snow.
Bring on spring and summer.