Mid-Atlantic Climate Impacts Summary and Outlook: Winter 2021-2022

MARISA Mid-Atlantic Regional Climate Summary map and title

A winter storm caused a traffic backup on Interstate 95 in northern Virginia for more than 24 hours. But despite several winter storms, the region largely received less than normal amounts of snow. Temperatures were generally a few degrees above normal for the season.

Read more about how the changing definition of a climate normal affects our understanding of future changes in precipitation, in the latest MARISA Seasonal Climate Impacts Summary and Outlook.

Highlights

A winter storm on January 3 impacted Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., dropping 12 to 16 inches of snow and causing a traffic backup over a 50-mile stretch of Interstate 95 in northern Virginia that lasted more than 24 hours.
Temperatures were generally a few degrees above normal across the region for the winter season. This was largely due to a warmer month of December, with six sites recording their second warmest December on record.
The southern and eastern portions of the region experienced below normal precipitation, while areas to the west generally experienced slightly above normal precipitation; the area around Pittsburgh and a part of central Pennsylvania received over 150 percent of their normal precipitation.
Despite several winter storms in January and February, the region largely received less than normal amounts of snow.
In an analysis of future differences from normal precipitation, we found that future projections of average annual precipitation show greater departures from “normal” across the Mid-Atlantic when using the 1981–2010 normal as a baseline than when comparing to the 1991–2020 normal.

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 Mid-Atlantic region.

MARISA is led by the non-profit RAND Corporation, in partnership with researchers in Penn State University’s Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, Johns Hopkins University, the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Morgan State University, and Carnegie Mellon University.