This winter season has been like a house guest who has overstayed his welcome and doesn’t know when it’s time to leave.

Winter started off mild with less than an inch of snow for the entire month of December, said Gary Lessor, a meteorologist with The Weather Center at Western Connecticut State University, but by mid-January it started to get cold, snowy and the month ended with a blizzard that dumped more than 2 feet of snow in some areas.

Lessor said that meteorologically winter ended on Feb. 28, but that doesn’t mean anything as the northeast is locked in a cold-weather pattern and the region will remain cold.

“We started off extremely mild and it basically started to build from there until it got so cold. February was just really cold,” he said.

He said February was the coldest month on record. Recorded temperatures for the Groton area aren’t available, but Lessor said the average temperature in February was 18.7 degrees when it normally should be 31.8 degrees.

Records dating back to 1948 for Bridgeport also show that February was record-breaking. The average temperature in that city was 19.5 degrees.

A snow storm that started Sunday and ended early this morning brought an additional 6 inches of snow to Groton and New London with Norwich receiving 4.75 inches.

So far, Lessor said Groton has received 53.25 inches of snow, more than doubling the average winter snowfall of 23.2 inches of snow.

But Lessor said the snowfall totals didn’t break the 1995-1996 record when Groton received 71.4 inches of snow.

Lessor said that more snow is slated to come Tuesday night into Wednesday. He said it will start off as snow, change over into freezing rain and then into all rain. That storm could bring an additional 2 to 4 inches of snow.

There is also potential for more snow Wednesday night into Thursday morning, but the weather models aren’t in agreement yet.

And while the calendar says that spring is on March 20, Lessor points out that this month will be 3 to 4 degrees colder than the average temperature of 37.3 degrees.

“You’re not going to turn a switch and it will suddenly become warm,” said Lessor. “We’re slowly going to come out of this. It’s going to be a gradual process but it will eventually get warm.”