March’s average temperature in St. Louis this year is almost 15 degrees above normal. If the forecast holds true tomorrow, St. Louis’s unusually high temperatures will make this the warmest March on record.
National Weather Service Meteorologist Mark Britt says the average temperature this month will be almost 61 degrees.
“The previous record of 1910 was only about 57.5 so that’s a considerable breaking of the record,” he said.
Britt says this year has seen unprecedented warmth across the Midwest.
“We were just in a pattern that did not allow any cold air to come down out of Canada throughout the month," he said. "So, it allowed the temperatures to stay above normal pretty much every day through the month.”
Weather experts say this month was the also the warmest March on record for both Chicago and the rest of Illinois.
The Chicago Tribune reported Friday that the warm spell blasted decades-old records.
State climatologist Jim Angel says the average temperature was 54.7 degrees for the state. That was more than three degrees higher than the last record of 51.6 degrees from 1946.
The average temperature in Chicago was 54 degrees, beating the old record of 48.6 set in 1945.
According to the National Weather Service, eight days reached at least 80 degrees in Chicago. Before this year, March temperatures that high in the city had only happened 10 times since the early 1870s.
