[Ian Williams]

Here is all the extremes collected from the daily world extremes threads for February

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This post has been edited by Ian Williams: 03 March 2012 - 18:13

[Dave K]

And here is the monthly round-up from the SMHI website's global weather summary translated into English

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February 2012 - Very cold month in southern Europe

In Europe, the major weather event, the very severe and prolonged cold that kept much of the continent in an iron grip at the beginning of February. In North America there was, however, very mild weather in February and the same is true in the Arctic.

EUROPE
Large parts of Europe were affected by a powerful "cold wave" at the beginning of the month. The severe cooling left several hundred people dead, mostly in eastern Europe. During the first week of February, average temperatures in many parts of Central and Eastern Europe were 10-15 degrees below normal. In Samedan in Switzerland the temperature fell to -35.1 °C on the 6th and the same day Oberstdorf in Germany, -29.4 °C . Even as far west as France was affected by the strong cold and where we must go back to January 1987 in order to find a longer and more intense cold spell. At the end of January / February was a very high air pressure over Russia. From Khoseda-Khard, just west of the Ural Mountains, air pressure was reported at 1068 hPa.

NORTH AMERICA
In most parts of North America in February it was very mild with average temperatures about five degrees above normal in large areas. This is also true in Alaska, where the very cold weather in January become much milder one week into February. At the end of the month the American Midwest had an unusually early outbreak of tornadoes with dozens of casualties.

ASIA
In southwestern parts of Asia and in Eastern Siberia many places were 2-7 degrees colder than normal. It was however in western Siberia locally ten degrees warmer than during a normal month of February.

ARCTIC
In virtually all of the Arctic, it was a mild or very mild month of February. For the fifth consecutive month, there was very large temperature positive anomalies in the environs of Novaya Zemlya, which in February had an average monthly temperature about 15 degrees above normal. Consequently, the ice extent continues to be very modest in that part of the Arctic Ocean. South of the Bering Strait, which in particular on the Russian side was very cold in both January and February, there is more ice than normal.

AFRICA
The very strong cold air outbreak that hit Europe at the beginning of the month, also affected the northern parts of Africa. In Algeria, it was in many places an average of four degrees colder than normal during the month. Station Medea in the Atlas Mountains reported a snow depth of 56 centimeters.

On the 5th the south western Indian Ocean a couple of tropical cyclones formed. The strongest was Giovanna, who after the middle of the month gave large amounts of rain on the island of Reunion then moved westward across Madagascar and then swung south over the Mozambique Channel. Giovanna was graded Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson scale.


Monthly temperature anomalies for February 2012

[Dave K]

And here we have from the same SMHI source the list of extremes for the continents. As usual these differ sometimes from the list that Ian has compiled because the data may come from different sources, and the SMHI list has no limit on station altitude.

We have an impressive monthly maximum from Narsarsuaq of 15.1 °C but this is not a February record for Greenland which is 16.0 °C at Nanortaliq in 2005. I have not yet seen any reports of likely national temperature records for either maxima or minima for the month although a few location records did fall.

[Dave K]

Christopher C Burt's monthly round-up is now online at http://www.wundergro...tml?entrynum=64

Worth a look as ever as it has info supplementary to that in the above posts