BIRMINGHAM, Alabama - Oh, it's nice outside today. It's the first day of spring. The high is 67. Birds are literally chirping. It's beautiful, invigorating.

But, oh, what a winter that was.

It snowed and rained and sleeted, and messed up our roads, and our lives. It made Atlanta a laughing stock (which, one might suggest, took the spotlight off our own struggles in Birmingham). It kept hundreds of teachers trapped in classrooms overnight with more than 11,000 students, and an untold number of drivers stuck overnight on the sides of highways, some with their families. Schools closed for days, shortening the school year for some. Several Waffle House restaurants closed temporarily, an indicator, perhaps, of how bad things got. There were stories of triumph - a doctor who walked miles in the snow to perform life-saving surgery, a baby, Wynter Dobbins, birthed at home - and stories of loss, including the seven deaths attributable to the Jan. 28 storm.

And it was cold. According to Aaron Gleason, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Birmingham office, it was the 17th coldest winter since 1896.

The National Weather Service calculates winter as the months of December, January, and February - a system different than the astronomical winter, which began Dec. 2, 2013 and ended today.

The average daily temperature for our winter was 43.1 degrees in Birmingham.

"What is a typical year for us? They tend to be a little bit warmer than that," Gleason told AL.com. "There tends to be some variability, and it is certainly by no means the coldest in recent history, but it is colder than average."

In 2010, the mean average temperature was 41, "and that was the coldest we'd had in a while." Birmingham also saw very cold winters in 1977 and 1978, where the average temperatures were 39 and 38, respectively.

The lowest minimum temperature was seven degrees for the Dec.-Feb. stretch. "Single digits for the Deep South - that's nothing to shake a stick at," Gleason said. "That's not too pleasant." The last time it got that cold was 2003.

As far as snow goes, the Birmingham area managed to rack up five inches of the white stuff in two storms in January in February.

"Five inches is fairly high for us," Gleason said. This winter tied for ninth place since 1896 in terms of snow.

To get a winter where we've had more snowfall than that, you have to go back to 1982, when Birmingham saw 6.6 inches.

However, because Gleason was looking at the December, January, February timeframe, that does not account for events like the Blizzard of March 12-15, 1993, when Birmingham saw an unprecedented 13 inches of snow in 24 hours. "It's relatively rare to get snow outside of that [Dec.-Feb.] timeframe," Gleason said.

The snowfall this year can be attributed, in part, to the polar vortex dipping into the South. According to Gleason, the polar vortex is "semi-permanent," but is usually confined to the North.

"It normally stays there [around the North Pole and Northern Canada], and that's why you don't hear about it," Gleason said. "Occasionally, rarely, it will have a large dip in the jet stream - that's an area of strong winds aloft - and when that happens, normally it happens when you have a bunch of high pressure off to the west."

"That's a rarity that we don't have to deal with, thankfully, pretty often."

Does the cold winter mean we'll have a cold spring? Not exactly, Gleason said.

"There's no causation where a cold winter means this for spring or the summer."