It looks like this winter will go down as our third warmest on record, and everybody wants to know why. All the usual suspects, such as global warming, and even a few relatively new ones, such as sunspots, have been mentioned.

The truth is, there is no single "smoking gun," no simple explanation. It could be all, some, or none of the above. This was not an El Nino or La Nina winter, so you can't place the blame there. Season-long climate patterns and trends are a superposition of many factors, some known and undoubtedly some still to be discovered, as well as simply natural variability.

One other point: The winter forecasts issued back in the fall were, quite frankly, very poor. Most called for a relatively cold and snowy winter in this area. There's a lesson to be learned here: seasonal forecasting is still in its infancy, and when there's not an El Nino or La Nina helping to skew the climate, we're still not very good at it.