Photo by kimberlyfaye

This winter has certainly been a brutal one. Below average temperatures and (slightly) above average snowfall totals have made most Washingtonians pretty damn sick of the season. When will spring come and put Old Man Winter out of his misery already?

But what’s sometimes more annoying than the actual weather is the coverage of it by local media. DCist, of course, is (sometimes) guilty of it. As the D.C. area is prone to a certain, um, overreaction to weather forecasts—particularly those involving snow—we like to poke fun at that when aggregating forecasts by employing a sarcastically hyperbolic tone. Of course, not everyone gets that.

So with talk of more freezing temperatures and snow in the near future, DCist chatted with a meteorologist from the National Weather Service’s D.C./Baltimore-region office in Sterling, Va. to find out what the weather forecast looks like for the rest of March.

If there’s one thing to take away from this, it’s this: Meteorologists can’t really predict the forecast beyond a week. Anything after is a prediction based on trends in weather patterns.

According to the meteorologist I spoke to, the six to ten day outlook says there’s a “70 percent probability of temperatures averaging below normal,” and a “40 to 50 percent chance that precipitation will be above normal.” While that means precipitation could be in the form of rain, snow, sleet, or ice, that current model fits into the trend of snow. “If there was going to be more snow, this is what it would look like,” I was told.

For the next eight to 14 days, the current models predict temperatures will be 70 percent below normal, with the chance for precipitation being 33 percent above normal. And for the rest of March, the models are predicting precipitation will be 33 percent above normal.

The current seven-day forecast on the NWS website calls for this weekend to be a nice, sunny reprieve from what we’ve been experiencing this week—highs in the 50s on Saturday and Sunday—but the cold temperatures and precipitation are expected to come back around Wednesday next week, with a 50 percent chance of precipitation during the day, continuing into the night and into Thursday.

The precipitation is currently predicted to be rain and snow. Snow. Prepare for certain doom, D.C.