Jennifer Edwards Baker reports:
Better warm up the car this morning.
Wind chills are in the single digits as an Arctic mass of air hangs over Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky on this the first full day of spring.
It’s 23 degrees with a wind chill of 9 at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, according to the National Weather Service in Wilmington. A stray snow flurry blew around overnight and could still drift this morning.
Lebanon schools up in Warren County have a two hour delay for grades 1-6 and there is no morning kindergarten. Kings Local is starting its elementary schools two hours later than normal, and Little Miami schools are on a 90-minute delay.
Later, the high temperature will only climb to 33 or 34 with a wind chill around 22, a good 20 degrees lower than normal for this time of year.
Tonight will be mostly clear but cold with a low around 20 and wind chills again in the single digits.
- Cincinnati.com’s weather page with interactive radar, 7-day and hourly forecasts & more!
- National Weather Service: West Chester 7-day forecast
- AccuWeather.com: West Chester extended forecast
Think that forecast stinks, especially this late in the month of March?
There’s a 60 percent chance we could see 1-3 inches of snow after 8 a.m. on Palm Sunday, said meteorologist Allen Randall.
“We are going to be under the grips of this Arctic air mass through the weekend and then we get some modification in temperatures, but we are still going to below normal as we go into next week,” he said. “We are looking at a storm for Sunday. It’s only Thursday, but we have the potential for 1-3 inches of snow during the daytime hours.”
This is not the latest it has snowed in March in recent years. CVG recorded a little over a half inch of snow on March 30, 2011.
So far this winter, 21.9 inches of snow has fallen, up an inch from what we normally see in an average winter, Randall said.
Last winter, however, was one of the warmest on record with just 5.6 inches of snow. March 2012 was the warmest on record locally since the weather service began keeping such records in the 1800s. In fact, on this date last year, the high temperature was a balmy 83 degrees.
