What’s the Deal With the Snow?

By Norah Jewett ‘25

The past few years, Beverly, MA and surrounding cities have on average been receiving less and less snowfall in the past few decades. When it would snow, it would typically happen in late January, February and March sporadically. I personally cannot remember having a white Christmas for around a decade, the last recorded white Christmas in Boston being 2009.

This trend is not surprising, as anyone with a brain understands that a warming climate leads to less low temperatures that allow for snow.

Yet for some reason, Beverly has had snow on the ground almost everyday since Christmas.

This is surprising because normally, it takes until mid-winter for it to snow because Beverly is located right on the coast, and the non-frozen ocean tends to keep air temperatures high enough to prevent frequent snowfall. And even after it snows in Beverly, it melts quickly and it can take weeks before the city sees another snowflake in the sky.

But I’m sure you’ve seen the snow banks that have been lining Beverly streets for a month and a half at this point.

So why is this happening? It’s not because climate change isn’t happening—quite the opposite actually. According to the Environmental Defense Fund, a warmer atmosphere leads to more evaporation from land and sea, so it results in more moisture in the air. It also leads to extremes, notable in the deadly hurricanes that have ravaged the South the past few years, and can also be observed in more snowfall than normal in a set area.

That isn’t to mean that the weather trend we’ve been seeing the past two months will become common. Whether you’ve looking forward to the snow and ice melting so you can make it to your car without fear of breaking your back, or you’re enjoying the view from your bedroom window, you cannot deny that this winter has been abnormal considering the weather patterns we’ve seen the past few years. And both the lack of snow we’ve seen the past few decades and the odd frequency occurrence of snowfall this year both stem from climate change, whether we like it or not.