Meteorological Winter Recap

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- Meteorological Winter starts Dec. 1 and lasts until Feb. 28/29. With the season wrapping up last week, the National Weather Service has released the statistics and records for South Bend.

For those months we had a lot of fluctuation of temperatures, but our highest temperature was just last week, reaching 59 degrees on Friday, our coldest was in the middle of January, with a long string of frigid temperatures bottoming out at -5 degrees on the 21.

The average high was around one degree higher than average, the average low about half a degree above average, 34.4 for the high, 20.8 for the low. Again, an overall average year temperature wise, with it being the coldest year on average since 2021.

We hit 5.45 inches of liquid precipitation, rain or freezing rain, and a total of 34.8 inches of snow in South Bend.

Both of these values are a significant decrease from average, rainfall totals were about 2 inches down from normal, snowfall totals around 17 inches below average. The driving factors for this include ice building on Lake Michigan, preventing lake effect snow from falling inland, and long stretches of cold temperatures in January and especially February.

There were 52 days that it snowed in South Bend, with twelve of those days measuring snowfall over an inch.

Last year had significantly less snowfall this year, but what it lacked in snow it made up for in rain, which still makes this winter the driest since 2015 in South Bend.