Chesapeake Bay Climate Impacts Summary and Outlook: Winter 2019-2020

MARISA Chesapeake Bay Watershed Climate Summary map and title

An unusually mild winter saw low snowfall levels in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, and Baltimore's first February without snow in more than a century of recordkeeping.

Read more, and use the interactive tools to explore freeze-thaw cycles in a changing climate, in the latest MARISA Seasonal Climate Impacts Summary and Outlook.

Highlights

The region experienced an unusually mild winter, which ranked among the ten warmest on record for many sites.
The coldest temperature observed this winter in Washington, D.C. was the warmest minimum temperature for winter on record.
This winter was also among the ten least snowy on record.
Six tornadoes touched down in Maryland and northern Virginia on February 7, 2020. The Mid-Atlantic averages about one tornado per winter.
It was the first time in Baltimore, Maryland’s 128 years of recordkeeping that the city saw no snow during February.
In both low and high emission futures, the southeastern Mid-Atlantic is projected by an ensemble of climate models to experience significant decreases in freeze-thaw days by mid- to late-century.

Read the Climate Summary

The MARISA Seasonal Climate Impacts Summary and Outlook is a seasonal series produced by NOAA’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments program that details seasonal weather and climate variability and change in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

MARISA is led by the non-profit RAND Corporation, in partnership with researchers in Penn State University’s Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, and the Environment, Energy, Sustainability and Health Institute at Johns Hopkins University, along with support from researchers in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University, and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.