March is the month where winter transitions to spring and warmer temperatures, birds and flowers make a return after months of cold weather. However, March can bring a variety of extreme weather, including hot temperatures, late-season blizzards and severe weather. This is why people say March comes in “like a lion and goes out like a lamb.”

The term “March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb” comes from folklore. Many believed that if the month of March started off with cold, stormy weather, then it would end on a pleasant and warm note. Today, people don’t necessarily use it to predict how the weather will turn out, but will instead use the term to refer to the wide range of weather that occurs throughout the month.

Quite a few historic weather events have occurred in March. The Blizzard of 1993, coined the Storm of the Century, paralyzed the eastern U.S. between March 12 and 15, 1993. Portions of the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic received more than a foot of snow, while the Northeast received 2 to 3 feet of snow in just a couple of days. Winter storms are not uncommon in early March when temperatures are still cold enough to produce snow.

Things typically quiet down by the end of March when the jet stream retreats to the north and temperatures warm up, which could explain why March “goes out like a lamb”. Once the wintry weather goes away and spring makes its official appearance, severe weather season begins to ramp up in the nation’s midsection. Severe weather season usually begins in April, but severe weather occurrences begin to increase by mid-to-late March.

March doesn’t always come in like a lion and go out like a lamb, however. In 2014, a winter storm dumped snow from the Plains to the Mid-Atlantic the first week of March. The month wrapped up with a winter storm in the Plains and Midwest.

Image: A lion roars. Photo by Robek via Wikimedia Commons.

March - A Month of Lions and Lambs