Borderland’s weather this season may be waffling like a candidate lately, but don’t expect the next seven days to dramatically vacillate like the heatwave experienced a year ago or to get slapped with another deep freeze, experts said.

While the snow in Borderland continues to pile up, and might receive up to another 8 inches on Saturday, forecasts for the region once again are pretty much now on par with the seasonal average, said Steve Gohde, observing program leader for the National Weather Service in Duluth.

The week’s high temps are supposed to be in the upper 20s and 30s with low temperatures still above zero, according to the seven-day forecast.

“It won’t be like last year. Sorry,” Gohde said.

These are typical temps, Gohde added. Meanwhile, in mid-March of last year records were broken when the temperatures hit 55 and rose to 78 degrees in about a week.

This winter, the Falls almost broke the other kind of record Jan. 24 when the temperature was one degree away from 37 below set in 1904.

“It’s not unusual to get a lot of snow in March as moist air from the south collides with cold air in the north. It’s an age-old battle,” Gohde said. “And while it’s not unprecedented by any means, we did get more snow in February than we’re used to since we’re normally dealing with dry prairie air at that time.”

As for snowfall, so far, International Falls has received 73.4 inches, which is 14.7 inches more than normal for this time of year. However, it may not set any final records since the season is definitely not over, Gohde and climate reports said.

Snowfall totals in the Falls so far are unofficially “in the top 15,” he said. No. 1 would be the winter of 1991-1992, with almost 99 inches by now, due in large part to the infamous Halloween blizzard.

That snowfall over the past couple months was attributed to early starting weather systems crashing into one another up from the Gulf of Mexico and down from Alberta, Gohde said.

The depth of snow still on the ground is around between 24 and 26 inches, according to the Weather Service and Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

And a DNR report stated that precipitation levels are above historical averages. That could translate into putting a dent into Minnesota’s ongoing drought, which is categorized as “extreme” or “severe” for roughly 70 percent of the state.

Gohde said International Falls also has gotten 3.87 inches in precipitation, which is 2.53 inches more than normal. This year’s frost is pretty strong, he said, so there are inches of worth of water just waiting to melt into the soil or lakes come spring.

How effective the winter will be in mitigating the drought, though, is dependent upon a variety of factors, experts said.

The DNR said it expects the snow and ice melt off to raise the level of lakes and wetlands to some degree. But much of the state still is relying on spring rainfall to recharge aquifers and soil moisture contents now near record lows, according to the DNR.

As for this weekend’s weather, Gohde said International Falls looks to be “just on the edge” of a weather system coming up from Nebraska in a swath through the Arrowhead region. He said that made it difficult to predict what the Falls will get.

“So we’ve got that possible target hanging over us,” he said.