March Summary

...March 2019 was the first month since January 2018 in which Bowling Green, Lexington, and Louisville International were all drier than normal...

The first week of the month was very chilly, especially the 4th-6th when daily average temperatures were about 20 degrees below normal. Lexington and Frankfort fell into the single digits on the 5th. A cold front passing through the region on the 7th-8th brought light snow with it, accumulating 1-2 inches from southern Indiana into the Kentucky Blue Grass region.

We got a foretaste of spring on the 13th-14th when temperatures rose into the 70s. However, the warm weather came at a price, as it often does this early in the season. One of only two severe weather events of the month occurred on the evening of the 14th. Intense low pressure spun from the Midwest to the Great Lakes and swung its cold front through the Ohio Valley. A corridor of severe storms set up from the western tip of Kentucky to central Indiana. An EF2 tornado missed the National Weather Service office at Paducah by just two miles. In addition, winds out ahead of the system, away from the storms, gusted over 60 mph at times. The great majority of the property damage that day resulted from the non-thunderstorm winds.

We experienced cool, quiet weather for most of the remainder of the month. There was some widely scattered wind damage from storms on the evening of the 30th across southern Kentucky caused by a sharp cold front. Winds gusted to 50 mph behind the front as cold air poured into the area. There were even a few snowflakes behind the front, just hours after the severe storms ahead of the boundary.

	Average Temperature	Departure from Normal	Precipitation	Departure from Normal	Snow	Departure from Normal
Bowling Green	45.7	-2.7	2.52"	-1.89"	Trace	-1.1"
Frankfort	42.4	-2.5	3.75"	-0.63"
Lexington	42.9	-2.6	2.87"	-1.20"	3.3"	+1.9"
Louisville Bowman	42.7	-4.3	4.26"	+0.10"
Louisville International	45.2	-2.6	3.74"	-0.43"	2.6"	+1.2"

Records

No records were set this month.

Wind damage in Louisville on the 14th. Photo courtesy Micheal Whitehead