Baby Boomers grew up with two more weeks of frozen lakes than Gen Z is living with now.
By Erin Douglas and Ken Mahan, Boston Globe, March 4, 2025
This is the first in a series of Globe stories examining New England’s changing winters.
Finally. We watched snowflakes glimmer in the light of street lamps. Kids played pick-up hockey on frozen ponds. And skiers relished in the abundant snow cover — a booming ski season was back.
After years of warm winters that limited snow sports and often left the ground muddy instead of blanketed by white, New Englanders this year welcomed back a winter season that felt, well, cold.
This more classic New England winter is thanks to a weak La Niña weather pattern that tends to draw in more cold air and help whip up storms. Even so, this winter doesn’t come close to the hallmark bitter cold winters of Boston: Temperatures trended below average but were generally well within what’s considered normal. And the snowfall in Boston was actually below average between December and late February.
New England winters are now 3 degrees warmer, on average, than they were during the Baby Boom of the late 1940s through the early 1960s, a Boston Globe analysis of weather data found. Winters here are warming twice as fast as summers. Those few degrees of warming caused by climate change have already sparked a big shift in New England’s winter climate. In just three generations, picturesque winter wonderlands and reliably freezing cold temperatures have become the exception. Instead, we’ve seen weather more associated with spring or fall: rainy days, mushy ground, and some chilly weather.
Compared with Gen Z, those born in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, Baby Boomers grew up with two extra weeks of temperatures low enough to freeze ponds and lakes, according to the analysis.
“We’re having winters where snow comes and goes, or maybe it’s a very wet snow — not that big, fluffy snow,” said Gillian Galford, an ecologist and earth system scientist at the University of Vermont. “It’s just a very different winter experience.”
The last time Boston had a February with an average temperature below 30 degrees was 10 years ago. Last year — which was New England’s warmest on record since data collection began in the late 1800s — the average winter temperature in Boston never even reached below freezing (it was 36.4 degrees).
Warmer winters have slowly upended local economies, disrupted ecosystems, and introduced new flooding concerns. With less snowpack and thinner ice, we’re not sledding or snowshoeing as often. Pond hockey games are getting canceled. And ski resorts rely more heavily on artificial snow-making to keep their operations functioning.
We still get snow — occasionally dumping in huge snowstorms — but the gentle and consistent snow days have become irregular and infrequent.
Climate scientists say the long-term trend for winters in the region is toward rain. And as the emissions from fossil fuels continue to heat the planet, winters like the one we just had are only expected to become more sporadic: Boston’s winters are now, climate scientists say, more characteristic of a normal winter in New Jersey, more than 300 miles south.
By the 2080s, only two generations from now, Boston’s winter climate is expected to feel more like Baltimore with temperatures well above freezing, assuming mankind makes an effort to reduce emissions. It could feel like Memphis by then, researchers have found, if fossil fuel emissions are not drastically reduced.
The vanishing winter climate has consequences: In New Hampshire, during the particularly warm winter of 2015-16, skier visits plummeted 25 percent. In Maine, invasive pests are now capable of surviving the winters without harsh freezes, and they’re sickening native animals and plants. In Massachusetts, cranberry and maple syrup production has been disrupted: Cranberry bogs rely on consistent freezes and maple trees require below-freezing temperatures at night to be tapped for syrup.
There just aren’t that many “freezing days” anymore, leading to shrinking snowpack. Hard freezes tend to set in at 20 degrees and below, but New England has lost an average of 16 hard freeze days per year since 1953, with most of that loss occurring in the last 15 years, data from weather stations show.
“Boston’s winter climate is becoming more like a city in the Mid-Atlantic region with warmer winters,” said Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center. She grew up ice skating on frozen ponds and cranberry bogs, but now, “the ice is rarely thick enough anymore,” she said.
On Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire, the ice melts 11 days earlier than it did in 1973. (New Hampshire has lost almost an entire month of subfreezing nights.) Maine’s lakes, too, are “icing out” one or two weeks earlier and the ice that does form is thinner.
This decline in ice thickness jeopardizes ice skating, pond hockey, ice fishing, and more. Some winter recreation events and activities have already been axed. Last year, the Pond Hockey Classic in Vermont was canceled due to rising temperatures.
At Lake Morey in Vermont, the ice skating resort can only count on about two weeks per year of good ice skating weather, an owner told the Globe last year. In the past, they could bank on more than six weeks.
Less snowpack is also affecting skiing: In Maine, for example, a dairy farm recently said it will no longer offer cross-country skiing on its property.
Portland, Maine has lost an average 7 inches of snowpack since 1940. Vermont, on average, has lost 10 since the 1960s. In New Hampshire, the state typically gets more than three months of deep snow cover; now, scientists estimate that there will only be — at most — two months of deep snow by the end of the century.
The loss of snowpack is not just a symptom of warming winters; it’s also making the problem worse. When the ground is covered in a layer of white, the sun’s energy is reflected from the ground and keeps the surface cooler. Exposed brown dirt absorbs that energy and generally warms the surface — accelerating the warming.
Snowpack also provides cover and camouflage for wildlife, including American martens and snowshoe hares, respectively. Now, the martens don’t have as many safe spaces to hide and the hares turn white while the ground is still brown.
“They are like the picture book story of climate change,” said Alexej Siren, a wildlife researcher at the University of New Hampshire, of the snowshoe hare.
‘Heavier dumps of snow’
Climate scientists say it’s no surprise that New England still gets huge snowstorms in a warming climate. There’s another factor at play aside from temperature: increasing precipitation.
“Even though warming means more rainstorms versus snowstorms, when there is enough cold air, we get heavier dumps of snow because storms now have more moisture to tap into,” Francis said. (For every 1-degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature, the atmosphere can hold about 4 percent more water vapor.)
The snowfall trend is far from uniform, however. Since 1949, Boston’s annual average snowfall has slightly ticked up, mainly due to blockbuster winter storms in 1993, 1996, and 2015 that unleashed enough snow to buck the trend.
But while most Southern New England cities have experienced a decline in snowfall, parts of New Hampshire and Vermont have seen a jump. Portland, Maine, however, has seen a decline of about 7 inches.
‘Dangerous’ rain-on-snow events
With more rain comes more frequent flooding in the winter. When rain falls on snow, the results can be hazardous for nearby communities.
“Rain-on-snow events are really dangerous because you get really rapid melting,” said Galford, of the University of Vermont. “Then, you have not just the precipitation that came down in that storm, but all the snow melt that goes with it.”
This results in “catastrophic” floods, she added.
In New Hampshire last year, an exceptionally warm winter led to a massive “rain-on-snow” storm in December. Six inches of rain fell in under 24 hours — about as much rain as the state would expect from a hurricane.
Instead of powdery snow piling up on the peaks, rain dumped on the mountains and flushed the melting snow and racing water downhill. The National Guard was called in to perform water rescues, and several ski resorts were forced to shut down just before their busiest time of the season due to flooding.
“It was devastating to see the state go through that,” said Elizabeth Burakowski, an earth and environmental research scientist at the University of New Hampshire.
Adapting to a warmer climate
The winter recreation industry has diversified in a warmer climate: some attempt to attract tourists in the summers instead, and ski resorts have spent more money on expensive snow-making equipment.
Loon Mountain Resort in New Hampshire now relies on snowmaking for 97 percent of the resort’s trail acreage. Snowmaking can be very labor and energy intensive, but climate change makes it essential to the business.
Brian Norton, the resort’s president and general manager, said that the ski season now starts later than it did when he first started working at Loon Mountain 25 years ago. Snowmakers frequently battle rain and higher temperatures.
“The drastic swings in temperature were not as common 15 or 20 years ago,” Norton said.
The resort has spent more than $10 million over the last decade on new snowmaking guns that can be turned on with just a push of the button, Norton said. The newer technology allows the staff to get trails ready faster, and take advantage of every little window of time when temperatures are cold enough to make snow.
The lack of deep, consistent snow is slowly, but surely, shifting the experience of growing up in New England. That’s something Burakowski, of the University of New Hampshire, has seen first hand with her family.
She remembers learning to ski in New Hampshire in the second grade. Now, there are fewer places where she can find deep snow packs to ski, and powder days are a rare treat. Most of her ski days are on artificial snow — and her 10-year-old son takes notice.
“[Sometimes], when he looks down from the lift, it’s just bare ground,” Burakowski said. “We’re kind of sliding down this ribbon of white.”
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