There has never been a March in history when there haven’t been any flakes of snow. Until now.

“There no snow in downtown this March – not even a trace amount recorded,” said David Phillips, senior climatologist at Environment Canada, since record keeping began in 1845. “It’s really astounding!”

This lack of snow beats the previous record of 1898 when trace amounts of snow – less than 0.2 centimetres – were seen downtown at the University of Toronto downtown campus. Normally, March in Toronto means an average of 22 centimetres of snow spread over nine to 10 days.

What makes this particular winter even more astounding, says Phillips, is a snowless November and March. “It seems like winter has been confined to three months instead of the normal six months,” he said, adding that it has snowed only between Dec.1 and Feb. 27 so far.

“Winter came in like a lamb, and went out like a lamb,” Phillips said. “We really didn’t see any lion-like weather.”

There is a chance that some more records will be broken. Toronto has only seen 46.2 centimetres of snow this season compared to the existing record of 47.1 centimetres in the winter of 1952 to 1953. On average, Toronto gets over 127.1 centimetres of snow every year.

This pattern of snowlessness has been echoed across the province. “The snowiest country in the world has got almost no snow in comparison,” Phillips said.

The record breaking pattern is expected to continue into the long weekend. Environment Canada is predicting 23 degrees Celsius on Friday, which would beat the current warmest temperate for April 2 set in 1967 at 20.6 degrees.

“We’ve got many indignant people telling us its to early for an April fool’s day joke, but it really isn’t,” Phillips said. “It’s going to be a spectacular summer-like weekend.”