So long, winter! The season by the numbers: Bellingham

SEATTLE- Near Bellingham is where winter blasts hit the Northwest from several different directions. When we see big rain and wind storms the Bellingham area catches the strong winds from the west, south and southwest. These often soak Western Whatcom and Skagit Counties. Fronts often stall across the northern part of Western Washington too. The area around Bellingham also get blasted by our cold eastern winds as well. The Cascade Mountains block the cold air masses in Central and Eastern Washington from making it onto our side of the Cascades, well almost all of it. There are two places in the Northwest that can channel those cold easterly winds right into Western Washington: the Columbia River Gorge (which blasts the Portland Metro all winter long) and the Fraser River Valley which often puts a deep freeze on Bellingham. Luckily for folks in Bellingham, and those Vikings at Western Washington U. didn't have too much dry and cold weather this winter. The price to pay though was dealing with a whole lot of rain.

Officially winter ends  with the Vernal Equinox at 9:30pm Saturday in our time zone.  And what a 90 days it has been. Here's the Bellingham winter by the numbers...

Our warmest day was 64 degrees (March 5th) and our coldest morning was 19 frosty degrees (January 3rd). The driest month and coldest month was January with 11 totally dry days. The whole winter only had 27 totally dry days out of 90. There were 17 days at or below freezing this winter and we had none in the March portion of winter. It was a really wet winter though, even by Northwest standards. The Bellingham Airport reported 12.60" of total rain this winter.