East Coast residents may remember polar vortex forecasts and snowstorms, but the U.S. weather data was dominated by warmer temperatures in the West.
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Two otters played by slipping and sliding in the snow at the National Aquarium in Baltimore.
The just-ended three-month meteorological winter period will be remembered for extreme temperature anomalies across the United States, including deadly and persistent polar blasts and eastern winter storms.
But for many parts of the country west of the Mississippi River, this winter was either the warmest or the warmest on record. In the West, temperatures could be brutally hot.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources and founder of WeatherWest.com, said available preliminary data shows that the last three months of winter have been the warmest on record “in many parts of the American West, by a tremendous margin.”
“Overall, the West had the warmest winter on record,” Swain said on a March 3 YouTube podcast. By Swain’s calculations, you could get into your car at the westernmost tip of the coast and drive east for more than 20 hours on the highway and still be in a place that experienced one of the warmest winters on record.
Texas set a new record for the warmest winter day in the nation on February 26, when the temperature reached 106 degrees at the weather station at Falcon Dam on the Rio Grande, according to the National Weather Service. Temperatures rose into triple digits that day for about 30 miles along the river. In many parts of the West, it was the second-warmest winter on record, if not the warmest on record. He said there was virtually no area in the West that was spared from the extremely unusual warmth, except for some areas in the California Valley where there was dense fog that prevented record-setting.
all over the country
Drastic changes in temperature were also observed within the Japan Meteorological Bureau’s jurisdiction. The La Crosse, Wisconsin Weather Service noted a 98-degree range between high and low temperatures, from -32 degrees near Owen on Jan. 25 to 66 degrees at Prairie du Chien on Feb. 17.
Similar fluctuations in high and low temperatures were seen in other areas, including South Bend, Indiana, where temperatures rose from a low of -10 degrees on February 1 to a high of 65 degrees on February 18. Overall, it was the 45th coldest winter in the region since records began in 1893, the weather bureau said.
This week’s summary of the period from December to February published by the local weather bureau included the following highlights:
- PHOENIX – Not only was it the warmest winter on record, March started out warmer than usual. The highest temperature on March 1st was the earliest 93-degree day on record, beating the record set in 1972 by four days.
- GREAT FALLS, Mont. – Five of the seven stations monitored had record 50-degree days this winter. Bozeman had 37 days with daily highs above 50 degrees, contributing to the warmest winter on record.
- SHERIDAN, Wyo. – There were 44 single-day high temperatures above 50 degrees and 20 above 60 degrees, both records.
Even bigger changes are looming in early March, as we see a major pattern change in the eastern United States.
See map
An official climate summary from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the weather service’s parent agency, is expected in the coming days, but some preliminary maps show the meteorological winter season and daily temperature trends over a three-month period.
Increased risk of wildfires
In many regions, meteorologists are also concerned that the arrival of spring will increase the risk of wildfires with drier-than-normal and warmer-than-normal temperatures.
According to the National Interagency Fire Center, there have been 7,895 fires and 385,991 acres burned nationwide since the beginning of the year, far exceeding the 10-year average of 4,323 fires and 91,529 acres burned.
“Numbers don’t tell the whole story, but they do confirm an important fact: Conditions, fuels, and weather patterns vary widely across the country from time to time,” the fire center said in its Feb. 27 weekly report.
Traces of climate change
Although natural fluctuations have had an impact, Swain believes there are signs of climate change in many aspects of winter weather. Cold waves. “In the eastern United States, winters like that don’t happen very often,” he says, so winter seems more unusual to people who experience winter weather. In addition to a string of days of below-freezing temperatures, many cold-day highs were set, but this winter did not show any widespread trends among regions with the coldest winter on record.
Swain said it was also notable that temperatures in Western countries exceeded the “high threshold” of being above normal.
Without the effects of climate change, it would be nearly impossible for the U.S. to witness the extreme water vapor plumes that caused heavy snowfall and flooding in some areas, or the lack of snow in parts of the West, he said. That’s just the “not so cold, hard truth.”
Dinah Boyles Pulver, a national correspondent for USA TODAY, covers climate change, weather, the environment and other news. Contact dpulver@usatoday.com or @dinahvp on Bluesky or dinahvp.77 on X or Signal.
