It’s Philly’s peak snow season, but temperatures are approaching 60 degrees. What happened to winter?

In what was a wholly unscientific observation, horticultural specialist Anthony Aiello, long familiar with the Philadelphia region’s plant life and the caprice of its winters, opined Wednesday that it’s beginning to smell a lot like March.

“You can sort of smell things coming out of the earth,” said Aiello, who is associate director of collections at Longwood Gardens, where the snowdrop blooms are far outdoing the snowflakes.

And it’s even beginning to look like March, said Aiello, or February — in North Carolina. In fact, Thursday’s high, 61, while well shy of the Philly record for the date — 69, in 1930 — was six degrees above the normal Feb. 9 high in Raleigh. The temperature at 8 a.m. in Philly on Friday, 57, was 11 degrees higher than it was in Glendale, Ariz., the Super Bowl site.

The roads remain brineless. Deep into winter, the PennDOT Philly region has used all of 9,000 tons of salt; it usually uses about 85,000 tons for the season, said spokesperson Brad Rudolph. And if those January heating bills are higher than usual, ask for a recount.

» READ MORE: In a Philly winter, expect anything. Even nothing.

The region is in a rarefied zone for snow deprivation, with just 0.3 inches measured officially at Philadelphia International Airport through Wednesday. No snow is in the forecast, and in the climatological peak of winter, it appears that even the computer models have given up on finding it.

Only three other winters among the 139 in Philadelphia’s period of record had under an inch of snow through Feb. 8. All three remained virtually snowless. Will this be the fourth one?

So far, a winter characterized by an unusually warm North Atlantic and chilly equatorial Pacific evidently isn’t about to flip the switch, based on the longer-range forecasts.

The world continues to warm. The 2022 global temperature was 1.44 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information, the fifth warmest on record. But climate specialists assure that winter’s extinction has a ways to go.

» READ MORE: The Delaware Valley has warmed robustly, experts say.

Parts of the West have had quite a season, with mammoth snows, and temperatures in parts of California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado have averaged 10 degrees below normal in the last 30 days. It’s not unusual for the United States to be a nation divided in winter, said John R. Gyakum, an atmospheric researcher at McGill University, in Montreal.

“When it’s bitterly cold out West, it tends to warm in the East,” said Gyakum, an originator of the term “bombogenesis” to describe rapidly intensifying storms for which the U.S. East Coast is a prime breeding ground.

It hasn’t been this winter. “You just have not had any kind of major coastal storm at all,” he said. Storms blow up in the Atlantic when cold air sliding off the coast interacts with warm ocean waters.

The waters have been plenty warm, but the Arctic air has been scarce, save for quick hits around Christmas and last weekend. Gyakum and other meteorologists such as Jon Gottschalck, chief of the Climate Prediction Center’s operational prediction branch, cite the unusually cool waters in the Equatorial Pacific, the La Niña phenomenon, as a major driver of this winter.

In La Niña winters, storm-inhibiting high pressure tends to build over the Southeast, said Gottschalck, and results in a “more inland” storm track, with storm centers passing west of Philly. Winds circulate counterclockwise around those centers, so Philly has been getting southerly winds as the storms pass.

Those warm winds in turn also may be contributing to the warmer waters over the Atlantic. That additional warming would work against snow and increase the chances that any precipitation would fall as rain.

However, this La Niña, now it in its third year, can’t explain everything, said Gyakum.

“There are a lot of larger-scale environmental conditions that control the storm tracks,” he said. “It’s always very difficult to determine cause and effect.” This winter, for example, hardly resembles that of 2021-22, when January temperatures were below normal and just over a foot of snow fell in Philly.

The days are getting longer, and by the end of the month, the sun’s wattage over Philadelphia will be about double what it was at the winter solstice.

The climate center has odds strongly favoring above-normal temperatures in much of the East through at least Feb. 22, with no significant snow threats in sight.

» READ MORE: Phil's reputation may take a hit

It is not clear what Punxsutawney Phil was seeing when he called for six more weeks of winter. But in fairness to the species, a survey of 74 forecasting rodents posted on groundhog-day.com showed some dissenters, with 33 of them seeing a mild trend. They must have been scanning different computer models.

(The forecast from Fred la Marmotte, a groundhog in northern Quebec, was unavailable. He was found frozen to death on Feb. 2.)

For his part, after the warmest January in Philly in 91 years, Longwood’s Aiello said he wouldn’t mind a spell of winter, although a late freeze might be hazardous to some of the early bloomers, especially nonnative plant species.

“I like having some snow, and I like having real winter,” he said. “January didn’t do much for me.”

Maybe next winter?