Winter marches on

COEUR d’ALENE — There are years when beating the rush to have snow tires removed is a good idea.

There are also years when it's not.

If you fall into the category of the former, well, Cliff Harris told you so.

“I told people ‘Don’t take the snow tires off just yet,’" the Coeur d’Alene climatologist said Monday.

A mild winter in North Idaho has turned into a traditional one with the arrival of March.

An unexpected storm dumped 5.7 inches of snow on Coeur d’Alene as of 4 p.m. Monday, and more was falling.

At one point, a blinding blizzard dropped 1.2 inches of snow in 22 minutes, from 2:05 to 2:27 p.m.

“It flat was snowing,” Harris said. “You could hardly see across the street.”

Harris said the snow came in three fast, furious flurries with sun breaks in between.

“It’s rare to get three heavy snows in one day,” he said. “It may not have seemed we got that much, but we did.”

That broke the March 4 record of 4.2 inches set in 1917. In the first four days of March, it’s snowed 8.9 inches, already above the average snowfall for March of 6.5 inches It snowed just 10.1 inches in February.

That brought this winter’s snow tally to 45.6 inches.

Harris noted that in early January, when less than 10 inches of snow had fallen, he predicted Coeur d’Alene could still hit 50 inches of snow for the season.

It may get there yet. Harris expects a system in the Gulf of Alaska to head this direction this week, and he believes there's a good chance of April snow.

He said nine of the last 12 days have had measurable snowfall, in contrast to the first half of winter, where there weren't even nine days of snow combined.

“I told people winter wasn’t over,” Harris said.