Record-high temperatures in the 70s are forecast for Philly on Sunday and Monday

Philadelphia has an excellent shot at setting high-temperature records the next two days, as an ambitious spring makes a run at routing the remnants of a winter that officially has been one of the mildest on record.

Sunday’s forecast high, 73 degrees, and Monday’s, 77, would set daily records for March 6 and 7. The “normal” highs for those days would be 49 and 50 degrees, respectively.

One cautionary note: It is still March, and it would be premature to feed your sweaters to the moths, forecasters advise. “Winter is not over by any means,” said Dean Iovino, lead meteorologist at the National Weather Service Office in Mount Holly, who has survived three decades’ worth of Philly winters.

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The warmth is surging northward ahead of a cold front that might set off showers Sunday and Monday, followed by a significant cool-down at midweek, with high temperatures forecast to be 25 degrees lower than Monday’s. A more significant cooling is possible next weekend.

For the next two days, however, it will be easy to believe that the meteorological community, which dates the first day of spring as March 1, has scooped nature, which says we must wait two more weeks for the equinox.

It’s not just the temperatures. The days are now an hour and 10 minutes longer than they were on Feb. 6; the birds, emboldened by the sun’s power, are picking up the volume; and the tree branches are swelling with buds that are showing off at sunset.

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Officially, the Dec. 1-to-Feb. 28 meteorological winter was the 11th warmest in Philadelphia in records dating to the 1870s, according to weather service data, with an overall average temperature of 39.6, just more than 3 degrees above normal.

It also continued a general winter warming trend tied to background climate change, with warming especially evident at night. For winters, this has been the warmest 30-year period on record.

The winter of 2021-22 generally was an unexceptional one for snow and cold east of the Mississippi, according to the Accumulated Winter Season Severity Index, tracked by the Midwestern Regional Climate Center.

Among all stations in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, only three — Charlottesville and Norfolk, Va., and Cape May — qualified as having “severe” winters, based on analyses of cold, snow, and snow cover.

The Jersey Shore had a more eventful winter than areas on the mainland. Atlantic City set three snow records in January — two for daily snowfalls and the other for the monthly total, 33.2 inches.

Philadelphia, whose seasonal total stands at 14 inches, about two-thirds of normal, and much of Pennsylvania have been caught in a snow hole that hasn’t been spackled, with totals well below averages in Harrisburg and Scranton.

And winter has been chary with severe cold around Philly. Three times temperatures reached single digits in Atlantic City. It didn’t happen once at Philadelphia International Airport.

While more snow isn’t entirely out of the question, says Paul Walker, senior meteorologist with AccuWeather Inc., sustained cold would be highly unlikely.

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“I think we’ve seen our worst. ... I don’t know if I want to promise anything,” Walker said.

In any event, Sunday will be nothing like March 6, 1872, when it got down to 5 degrees in Philly, the lowest March reading on record.