The state of spring in Southwest Virginia isn’t quite cold and wet, but perhaps cool and damp.

The next several days will exemplify that, as cold fronts moving through both this morning and again on Monday will bring with them a round of breezy cool after showery rain. In between, though, will be a mostly dry and fairly warm weekend.

While there may even be a few snowflakes in the mountains come Monday night, and possibly a night or two near freezing thereafter, none of the cold fronts is packing a solid punch of Arctic air.

And, unless overnight rain got more carried away than expected, the frequent rounds of rain over the past several days haven’t been particularly heavy.

It has been enough to move the Roanoke and New River valleys from moderate drought to just “abnormally dry” on the latest U.S. Drought Monitor .

Several weeks of frequent light to moderate rains, with maybe a soaker or two thrown in, could get us well out of the drought going into the summer months.

The overall jet stream pattern across the nation is a little more typical of early to mid-March than early April. Storm systems are diving very far to the south, with the severe storms and heaviest rainfall near the Gulf Coast.

Abundant rain has been falling in some of the drought-plagued areas of Georgia and the Carolinas, so much so that no areas of severe or extreme drought remain in those areas.

And it’s been snowing a ton in much of the Rockies and the central United States, as far south as Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle last week. In several recent springs, severe thunderstorms were already common much farther north in the Plains states by this time of year.

April is starting a little cooler, relative to normal, than March finished as a whole, in the region.

March ended about a degree above normal at 48.3 degrees and slightly more than a third of an inch below normal in precipitation at 3.47 inches in Roanoke, close enough to basically be considered a normal March, weatherwise.

Blacksburg was a little warmer and wetter, relative to its normals, which are uniformly colder than Roanoke’s, but very similar in precipitation. Blacksburg’s average March temperature of 43.3 degrees was nearly 2 degrees above normal, while the March total precipitation of 4.58 inches was 0.75-inch above normal.

The Climate Prediction Center  is calling for cool, damp weather to dominate over at least the next six to 10 days, with no extremely warm weather in sight.

It is quite possible that we are beginning to see dampness replace dryness as the recurring weather trend for 2009.