PENNSYLVANIA, USA — February is typically one of the coldest and snowiest months of the year, but that is a hard concept to grasp this week, with temperatures expected to be close to 60 in the next few days.
This year's Valentine's Day forecast is nearly perfect, but it will be much warmer than it should be for this time of year.
The average high for the week of February 14 in the Scranton area is 39 degrees. The warmest Valentine's Day on record was in 1946 when the high at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport was 62 degrees.
Although we will not break any records for Valentine's Day this year, with a forecast high right around 50, it is possible we break a record later in the week.
The coldest low temperature recorded on Valentine's Day happened less than a decade ago. In 2016, the morning low in the Scranton area was -6 degrees.
But probably the most memorable Valentine's Day, if you were living and working here in Pennsylvania at the time, was in 2007, when the sweetest holiday of the year became the snowiest. On the night of February 13, 2007, 2.5 inches of snow fell, and by the next day, the snow continued to accumulate. The Scranton area recorded 15.5 inches of snow on February 14, making for a two-day storm total of 18 inches of snow.
The Valentine's Day Snowstorm of 2007 stranded tens of thousands of drivers on highways for hours and hours. It was more than 15 hours stuck on Interstate 81 for our Newswatch 16 crew that day.
Over the years, we have gone back to flower shops in the area where employees have reminisced what it was like to work through the storm on their busiest and most important day of the year.
2007 ended up being in the top 10 snowiest Februarys on record, thanks to that Valentine's Day snowstorm.
So far this February, the WNEP backyard has not recorded even half an inch of snow, with none in the forecast, now halfway through the month.
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