Back in February of 2010, when the epic blizzard that came to be known as “Snowmageddon” left the D.C. area blanketed in white, kids of all ages engaged in a fabled rite of childhood: They ran downstairs in their pajamas, turned on the television, and, in a scene seemingly descended right out of A Christmas Story, gazed at the chyron crawl at the bottom of the screen, waiting for news that schools in their district were closed. (Or maybe they just checked their phones.)
Fast-forward 14 years and the beloved snow day seems to be endangered. The world is getting warmer. This past September was the hottest on record worldwide. Temperature logs at Reagan National Airport dating back to the 1940s indicate that the 10 coldest days ever recorded in Arlington all occurred in the last century. The 21st century has yet to make the list.
And—in perhaps the cruelest cut of all—the pandemic taught schools that remote learning was at least somewhat doable with technology.
Who or what poses the greatest threat to the snow day tradition as we know it?
“The majority of it is climate change,” says Arlington resident Ryan Miller, an NBC Storm Team4 meteorologist and science teacher at Washington-Liberty High School.
“After that, maybe Fairfax County,” he jokes, referring to a recent policy change that capped that school system’s snow days at five per year, with the option of implementing “unscheduled virtual learning days” in the event of inclement weather lasting longer.
A teacher of environmental science and geographic information systems (GIS) for the past 22 years, Miller has also been a trusted meteorologist for 19 years. He’s basically a perfect storm of information on this topic.
“The trend overall is that we are experiencing warmer winters,” he says. “And we’re seeing more wild swings in temperatures—something that’s been predicted for a long time by folks who study climate science. We’ll have an intense few days of cold because the polar vortex unleashes and comes down south, but then you’ll see fluctuations in the opposite direction.”
Urbanization is partly to blame for changing conditions that make snow less likely in the DMV, he says. “It’s warmer in cities than rural areas. Our big storms have to have a really good lineup of factors off the coast, with cold air in place, and it’s not something that is typically happening here. To get a blizzard, it takes a big set of variables coming together in a very precise manner.”
Our region, it seems, is forever stuck just beneath the cusp of truly frigid air. Now warming temps have the potential to make rare snow even rarer.
This year our old friend El Niño is back, according to the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center, bringing wetter-than-average conditions. But whether that increased precipitation (caused by changes in global atmospheric circulation resulting from a shift in the Pacific Ocean’s jet stream) will arrive in the DMV in the form of snow remains to be seen.
“That’s the funny thing,” Miller says. “El Niños come in different flavors and varieties. For us to get a lot of snow, we could use a medium range El Niño—neither strong nor weak—with really cold air in place. That funnels a lot of moisture over the East Coast and we get dumped on. If you get a really strong El Niño, you might have a lot more moisture, but you’re more than likely not going to have the colder temperatures to get the snow. It’s the Goldilocks effect of El Niño. It has to be just right.”
And if there is snow, what’s the likelihood of a week of school cancellations on par with 2010?
“We didn’t have a single snow day last year,” Miller observes. “Last year we had .4 inches of snow. Not even a half an inch. The year before that, we had 13 inches. We generally average 12 to 14 inches. In 2010, 56 inches. In 2014, 32. It’s such a crapshoot. If we can line the moisture up with the cold, that’s how you get 56 inches of snow.”
At this point, a kid might be inclined to quote a line from the movie Dumb and Dumber: “So you’re telling me there’s a chance?”
“Yes,” says Miller. “There’s always a chance. It’s possible, just not probable.”
This scientific assessment has admittedly made him less than popular with his own fifth-grade daughter and his son, a high school student at W-L.
“They’re always bummed,” he says. “The rumors are going around school that there’s going to be a snow day and they ask me and I’m always Debbie Downer. I’m the one who puts all the hopes and dreams away.”
Here’s hoping he’s wrong. There’s always a chance.