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Don’t give up on that snowfall record yet

It seemed like a sure thing as the week began. Two incoming storms were on the radar, and Boston was flirting with the all-time record for snowfall.

But somehow, the consecutive snowfalls spared the city (sorry, Cape Cod), and now Bostonians are wondering whether this season will come up short of the 2 inches we need to break the 1995-1996 record. It’s March, after all, and temperatures are finally warming.

Historical snowfall records (see graphic above) show we still have a good shot at the title. Though snowfall tapers off significantly in March, the next few months would have to be unusually mild for 2014-2015 to miss the record of 107.6 inches.

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We entered the month needing 5.7 inches to surpass the record. So far, March has registered 3.7.

In the 124 years in which the National Weather Service has collected monthly snowfall data, March, April, and May produced less than 5.7 inches only 43 percent of the time.

The most we ever got during that three-month period was 41.1 inches in 1993, and the median was 7.5 inches.

March is understandably the snowiest month of the three, but this is Massachusetts, and storms can strike hard in April. Take the April Fools’ Day Storm of 1997, which deposited more than 2 feet.

In 1996, the record year, a late burst of winter weather dropped several inches in April. The year had already broken the record by then — but that last gasp is now the difference between history and obscurity.

Share your thoughts about the record below.


Catherine Cloutier can be reached at catherine.cloutier@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter at @cmcloutier. Andy Rosen can be reached at andrew.rosen@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @andyrosen.