Snow, a short-timer
Unlike last month's batch, this snow won't last long.
Until this morning, we had forgotten that snow actually was white. (Yes, technically, it's color-less, but it looks white to us.)
The snows that fell in January, fortified with doses of ice, were tenacious. Some of us never got around to taking down the Christmas lights.
They stayed around long enough to get ugly, but that's not coming to happen this time.
The February sun is asserting itself day by day, turning the blacktop into a poor man's hot plate.
Although temperatures were below freezing this morning, the powder-puff snow still was melting.
This afternoon, temperatures nudged above freezing, a bit higher than anticipated, and that probably had a lot to do with the sun.
As Fred House at Drexel University has pointed out, of all the energy the sun above Philadelphia gains from the winter to summer solstices, 36 percent of it occurs in February.
Tomorrow more snow should vanish, and then it looks like back-to-back rainstorms later this week and and early next week.
It would be premature, however, to declare an end to winter. The Groundhog has already made that mistake.