Warm winter means summer will start dry

AMHERST, Mass. (WWLP) - Last year, we experienced one of the snowiest winters in recent years, this year it was the winter that never was.

And to give you a sense of how much our temperatures have shifted, the average temperature for the month of March in 2011 was 44.8; this year it was 56.4.

This was the case all over North America as every state in the nation set at least one daily record high in the month of March, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration.

Fred Venne is an educator at the Beneski Museum of Natural History at Amherst College, he told 22NEWS he wouldn't call this a shift in the climate but rather an extreme temperature change that will continue into the summer months.

"Heading into the summer with a very dry potential we don't have a lot of water retained, we have no snowfall, we are going to have a fairly dry start to the summer.  Whether or not they are going to bring in more rain it's going to be that jet stream and how the oceans impact the jet stream,” Venne told 22NEWS.

This winter was also the fourth warmest and driest winter in North America, in terms of snowfall.  Venne says these shifts are attributed to changes in the jet stream, narrow air currents in our atmosphere, which drives cold air down and warm air to rise up.

It's a phenomenon that often times brings up the topic of global warming but Venne says data suggests it's more a of a weather blip; citing there's not enough consistent data to support the theory and conclude that this warm winter is the start of global warming. 

Venne added that the last significant global warming event happened nearly 18,000 years ago when glaciers began to retreat and large mammals, like the mammoth, lost resources and went extinct.