[Read: ‘Here to Ruin Your Daily Commute:’ A Plague of Potholes Jolts the Midwest]

The weather comes during a winter of extremes. In late January, Chicago broke a record for lowest maximum daily temperature at minus 10 degrees, busting its earlier record of minus 3 degrees. The city also hit a record daily low at minus 23 degrees.

A few days later, in early February, Washington, D.C., broke a 28-year record when highs reached 70 degrees, a balmy temperature more common to South Texas or Los Angeles.

Last month, though, was the first February on record that downtown Los Angeles did not reach 70 degrees, a milestone marked by light grousing from Angelenos. But when it snowed in the city last week, it prompted a flurry of delighted social media posts. And when the Bay Area got a dusting earlier this month, residents of the region got out their sleds.

According to climate experts, increasing weather extremes are in keeping with broader predictions of climate change. Severe weather — be it precipitation or cold — worries observers in the Golden State, where every storm brings the risk of mudslides in fire-scarred communities and flooding. Daniel Swain, a California climate scientist, said that climate change is making extreme swings between warm weather and cold weather, drought and rain, the new normal.

[Read: Both sides of the climate change debate are using extreme weather in their arguments.]

“Things are changing faster than I think has been apparent to a lot of people,” he said. “It seems incremental until it doesn’t.”

He said he had heard stories from Californians who did not think much about wildfires — they were just things on the news — until they found themselves screaming at their children to get in the car before flames reached their homes. He said he had also heard from South Lake Tahoe residents who had owned their homes at lake level for decades and who said that they had noticed their yards were getting blanketed less and less frequently. So when it does snow in years like this, the contrast is more marked.