Dr. Jeff Masters -Bitter and Balmy: Local Highlights from an Astounding February

[malaise]

We won’t have the full state-by-state picture of February’s U.S. climate for a few days, but the outlines are abundantly clear from city climate summaries issued on Sunday. It’s been almost 40 years since the nation has seen a month so starkly divided between a cold east and warm west. The statistics bring to mind early 1977, when snowflakes fell for the first and only time on Miami Beach’s art deco buildings while skiers in the Rockies found themselves hunting in vain for fresh powder. A more distant analog for the sharp eastern cold is January 1934, as evident in the records broken below. This year millions of people experienced either the warmest or coldest February for their locations, with records in some cases going back more than 100 years. A number of cities had their coldest average temperature for any month on record—truly stunning in a climate that’s running close to a record-high global air temperature. Meanwhile, February proved to be the warmest winter month ever documented across a huge swath of the West. Alaska wasn’t as consistently warm as parts of California through the month, but a few extremely mild air masses pushed into the state, helping produce the first thundersnow on record in Nome and an all-time monthly high of 53°F in the town of Homer.

[LWolf]

1. It was certainly much warmer than usual

in my western region. We got a very early winter with a large storm the second week of November, and a few colder days and light snows after that, but for the most part, it was much, much warmer than normal, and we got a great deal of rain. The local snowpack is low, which means a dry summer.

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2015/02/snowpack_levels_near_record_lo.html

[Nitram]

2. Confirms the fact that more energy in the system...

...produces greater extremes in weather.