Ordinarily, Matt Trombley takes his first customers out on the ice around Christmastime. This year, though, he didn’t lead his first Rutland County ice-fishing trip until February.
“I had people calling left and right in January,” Trombley said. “I told them we don’t have any ice — in the middle of January — and they were like, ‘Excuse me?’”
Trombley runs the Vergennes-based guide service 3rd Alarm Charters, which he said does most of its business during the warmer months but has led ice fishing trips in the region for years.
With warming winters and increasingly unreliable and unsafe ice conditions, however, Trombley said that guiding during ice-fishing season is no longer worth it. In the past two years, he said, 3rd Alarm Charters has done less than 25% of its normal winter business.
“It has been steadily tougher,” Trombley said. “To be honest with you this is probably our last year doing it.”
The paltry ice conditions this year have been a result of what has been the warmest meteorological winter on record for large swaths of Vermont, a striking example of rising temperatures across the globe due to climate change.
According to data from the National Weather Service, the Burlington area just concluded its warmest winter since at least the 1886-1887 season, when recording for the area first began.
Across the three months that comprise the meteorological winter — December, January, and February — Burlington saw a record-high average temperature of 30.7 degrees this season, shattering the previous record of 30.1 degrees. Burlington also saw its highest recorded minimum temperature of 3 degrees, making this one of only a handful of winters on record that Burlington didn’t see temperatures at or below zero.
Burlington wasn’t the only area that set records this season. According to NWS data, St. Johnsbury and Woodstock both notched new high average winter temperatures. Montpelier and Bennington, meanwhile, each had their second-warmest seasons on record.
The toasty winter came on the heels of a year that was itself overall the warmest on record in the Burlington area, during which Vermont faced various forms of extreme weather, including last summer’s historic flooding.
The high temperatures have come amidst the ongoing El Niño, a periodic climate phenomenon known to increase global temperatures, which scientists have said is exacerbating warming trends caused by climate change and driving record heat across the globe during its current cycle.
According to Robert Haynes, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Burlington, the phenomenon isn’t necessarily the main driver of record temperatures in the Green Mountain state this year, however.
“(El Niño) is a contributing factor as far as the global temperature is concerned,” said Haynes. “Here, regionally, it does not have quite as much of an impact. Specifically speaking, it’s very marginal here in the northeastern United States.”
Haynes said that one of the contributing factors to the record temperatures was the lack of snowfall in much of the state. Between December and February this year, the Burlington area had just 31.2 inches of total snowfall, which is the third-smallest amount since the 1980-1981 season.
“With as little snow as we’ve had … we have a lot more darker Earth that absorbs more sunlight,” said Haynes, who noted that more snow reflects sunlight and ultimately cools down the earth.
Haynes also attributed the record temperatures to an excess of cloud cover over parts of the state this year. According to the NWS, this January was the cloudiest on record in Burlington since 1951. Haynes said that the cloud cover has essentially insulated the Earth, trapping in heat.
“With the cloudy nights especially … we have not had temperatures radiate out as efficiently as they would if the skies are clear and open,” said Haynes.
As far as next year goes, Haynes said it would be “hard to break the record in consecutive seasons” but that the warming trend likely isn’t going away.
“Given the fact that we’ve had warmer-than-average winters over the last several winters, statistically it’s a safe forecast to suggest that it’ll be likely a warmer-than-average year next year,” said Haynes.
