MAIN WEATHER AND CLIMATE TRAITS IN THE NORTHEN HEMISPHERE AS OF FEBRUARY 2024

Air temperature

New air temperature maxima that were set in the ETR at the end of January continued to come forth in the first decade of February: they were measured in the North Caucasus, the Black Earth region, Crimea, the Lower Volga and Donbass. Air temperature anomalies were negative in the north of the ETR only and positive everywhere else, up to +6° or more. The weather in the Urals and Western Siberia was even warmer than usual, with the temperatures up to or higher than +8…10°.

At the beginning of the second decade, the extremely hot weather with new daily maxima still persisted in the south of the ETR, but then, the colds came both there and to most of the country, and new record-breaking minima were now recorded in the republics of Altai and Khakassia located in the south of Siberia, in the Omsk and Novosibirsk Regions, and in the Krasnoyarsk Territory. At the same time, the heat was ousted far to the west of the country, and to Taimyr.

In the third decade, the heat advanced along the Arctic coast as well as to the north, north-west and centre of the ETR where the weather became so warm that even new temperature maxima were reported at the end of the month. But the rest of Russia was still frozen by bitter colds creating new temperature minima.

          MAIN WEATHER AND CLIMATE TRAITS IN THE NORTHEN HEMISPHERE AS OF JANUARY 2024
 
Air temperature
 
Once the New Year began, cold Arctic air rushed to the ETR, the Urals, Siberia and the Far East, and brought the record-breaking frosts to the north-west of the ETR, to Central Russia and to the Volga region in the first decade of the month, dropping the thermometer readings close to -40° all over this area. The average temperature anomalies in the first decade were as low as -4…-15° in the ETR, and as -4…-8° in the Asian Territory of Russia.
In the second decade, the frosts became less severe, yet the average temperature in most of the country turned out to be 2-8° lower than normal.
The warmth came in the third decade, replacing the extreme colds recently observed here and there with the decade temperature averages 2-10 or more degrees higher than usual in the same locations, and resulting in new records of warmth in the south of Siberia and of the Far East. In the last days of January, numerous daily temperature maxima were set in the north and north-west of the ETR.
In terms of final monthly averages, two foci of cold weather with subnormal monthly-averaged temperatures were formed in Russia this January: the north-western and central ETR regions as well as the Volga region and the Urals from the west, and Yakutia, Kolyma, Kamchatka, Sakhalin and the Khabarovsk Territory from the east. And between them, i.e., in most of Siberia, as well as outside in Chukotka, the weather was abnormally warm. Negative anomalies of monthly-averaged temperatures amounted to -2…-6°, and positive ones, to more than 2°.
The air temperature monthly-averaged over the whole Russian territory was close to normal. None of the federal districts entered the top twenty warmest for the period from 1891 to 2024.