This Winter Was The Hottest On Record. Seriously!

With the glaring exception of eastern North America
the world was wicked warm in February, 2015
says a new report from NOAA.  

My fellow Vermonters and my neighbors in New England will surely throw big, heavy but inexpensive things at me for saying this, but this now-concluding winter was the warmest on record.

Before the debris flies, I'm talking about the world as a whole having the warmest on record. New England and southeastern Canada were the glaring exception to this.  

NOAA's National Climatic Data Center released its closely watched monthly analysis of the global climate today said the period December 1 through February 28 marked the warmest winter on record for the globe. Their data goes back to about the late 1880s.

Overall, February itself was the second warmest on record for the entire Earth. Here where I live in little tiny Vermont, we endured our second coldest February on record.

For the United States as a whole, it was the 19th warmest winter on record. While New England froze, large swaths of the western United States had a very warm winter.

From the Climate Data Center report:

"In February, 2015, cooler to much cooler than average conditions overtoook the entire eastern half of the United States and the eastern third of Canada, with some record cold pockets seen around the Great Lakes region and parts of northeastern Canada near Hudson Bay. 

The majority of the world's land surfaces, however, were warmer than average, with much warmer than average temperatures widespread across Central America, northern and central South America, Australia, most of Africa and much of Eurasia, including a broad swath that covered most of Russia. 

In stark contrast to the eastern United States, the western United States was encompassed by record warmth. The warm-cold pattern over the country has been observed over much of the past two years."

By the way, that warm-cold pattern seems to be in a continual stuck position. March has been behaving much of the same way, and this pattern should hold at least through the first week in April, and probably beyond that.

I don't know what it will take to get it unstuck.

The NOAA report also said that February Arctic sea ice extent was the third lowest on record.