March winter

Melting ice at the end of March in Mecklenburg (2018)

As March winter a frequent in Central Europe late winter is called. This cold snap usually occurs around the middle of March with frosty temperatures, often when the previous winter was very mild.

The March winter is counted among the meteorological singularities and typically separates early spring from mid-spring . This cold spell can occur from late February to early April, depending on the year. In most cases, the cause is polar cold air penetrating from the northeast , which is very cold and dry. Meteorologists attribute it to the North Atlantic Oscillation . If by then it was already quite warm due to a high pressure area or warm air from the Atlantic Ocean and nature has already adjusted to spring, the late frosts in March winter can lead to a development delay of one to two weeks and also - feared in fruit growing - serious crop losses because the early bloomers are hit in their bloom and freeze to death. In particular, with simultaneous entry of moisture, delayed - and then heavy - snowfalls can occur again. In this case one speaks of a pre-monsoon wave (VM) as a singularity, with cold and moist air from northern directions. Even without frost or snow, the cold spell can lead to losses in agriculture because the bees, as the main pollinators, do not fly.

Examples

There was an enormous cold snap at the beginning of March 2005, for example in Albstadt-Degerfeld in Baden-Württemberg, temperatures as low as minus 25 degrees.

There was a violent March winter in 2013. After a few first spring-like warm days at the beginning of March, from March 8th from north to south there was a strong ingress of cold air in Central Europe. In northern and eastern Germany in particular, there were monthly records for minimum temperatures and snow cover levels, and March 2013 was one of the coldest March months in the last hundred years. The Easter weather at the end of March was also wintry. Only after the first week of April did the cold slowly subside.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ cf. for example Johannes Lüers : Agricultural climatological and phenological evaluations for the Middle Moselle valley. Effects of climate change on the grapevine in the Moselle region . Dissertation geosciences. University of Trier, Trier 2003, 3.5 High-pass filtering of the middle year of the daily mean of the air temperature , p. 25 ( Abstract , Unibib Trier, with download pdf).
2. ↑ March winters are not uncommon. In: Focus Online . March 6, 2010, accessed February 13, 2020 .