It's Spring! It's Spring?

There's more than half a foot of snow covering the ground. Strong winds of the past two days have created knee-deep drifts. Dragon's teeth icicles are posed on gutters, waiting for their chance to impale the ground beneath. Temperatures dance between single digits and the teens.

Am I describing January? February? No - I am describing the first day of Spring - today. Where is our typical Spring? The jet stream continues to stray to the south, allowing cold air from Canada to ooze southward. When it meets up with the snow-covered ground, what we're left with is cold, cold, and more cold.  The sun's strength is the same as we experience in September, but all that snow and frozen ground leaves us with this endless winter.

It wasn't the coldest start to the first day of Spring ever in Minnesota. That record goes to March 20, 1965 when the day started at -9F and barely reached into the single digits. But today puts us in the top ten coldest starts to Spring. Yeah! (spoken facetiously, of course.)