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Spring Is Just A State Of Mind As Wintry Weather Wallops Much Of Nation

In St. Louis on Sunday the sliding — even without a sled — was good. The area got 6 to 12 inches of new snow over the weekend.
Bill Greenblatt
/
UPI /Landov
In St. Louis on Sunday the sliding — even without a sled — was good. The area got 6 to 12 inches of new snow over the weekend.

The calendar says one thing, but the snow, slush and ice coating the nation from the Central Rockies through parts of the Midwest and on into the mid-Atlantic and Northeast say something else entirely.

Technically, it's spring.

In reality, winter still hasn't let go.

The Weather Channel, which as we've noted before now insists on naming winter storms, writes that "winter storm Virgil is making its final stop in the Northeast after delivering a swath of significant snowfall from the central Rockies to the Midwest over the weekend." It adds that:

"Additional light snow showers or flurries will persist across much of the Missouri-to-Ohio corridor on Monday; in addition, some light accumulations will sink south into Kentucky and even the Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee."

NBC News calls this "Messy Monday" and says winter weather advisories are warning "of a mixture of snow and rain for Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, metropolitan New York and parts of northeast New Jersey."

As we reported earlier, this sure makes you wonder about Punxsutawney Phil's prognosticating prowess (and has led an Ohio prosecutor to accuse the groundhog of "misrepresenting spring").

The good news, The Weather Channel says, is that the storm should exhaust itself later today or early Tuesday.

Then maybe spring will be sprung?

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.