Wintry, yes, but hardly historic

RALEIGH -- You probably don't need a meteorologist to tell you this, but it was an unusually cold and snowy winter.

But we've had worse, according to the National Weather Service.

It was the sixth-coldest winter since modern record-keeping began in 1944 at what is now Raleigh-Durham International Airport, and the coldest since 1978, though the winters of 2003 and 2004 were close.

The average temperature for December, January and February was 38.6 degrees as measured at RDU, about 2.5 degrees below normal, according to weather service records. The 7.2 inches of snow that fell during that three-month period was 1.4 inches more than normal. That made this only the 21st-snowiest winter on record in the Triangle, though it was the 12th-wettest.

The unusual cold was a result of the North Atlantic Oscillation, said Jeff Orrock, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Raleigh.

The oscillation is an atmospheric phenomenon tied to the relative strength of low and high pressure systems over the Atlantic Ocean, and this year it helped usher more cold air into the mid-Atlantic region, Orrock said.