Remember how cold the winter was? Meteorologists beg to differ.
East Coast residents may remember polar vortex forecasts and blizzards, but U.S. weather data was dominated by warm temperatures in the West.
Dinah Voyles PulverThe three-month meteorological winter period that just ended will be remembered for its wild extremes in temperature across the United States, including deadly, persistent polar blasts and winter storms in the East.
But for much of the nation west of the Mississippi River, it was either the warmest winter on record or one of the warmest. In the West, the temperatures were sometimes blazing hot.
The preliminary data available shows the three-month winter was warmest on record “by a ridiculous margin in many locations throughout the American west,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources and founder of WeatherWest.com.
“Collectively, the West was by far the warmest it has ever been in the recorded record for winter," Swain said during a YouTube podcast on March 3. As he calculates it, you could get in a car at the westernmost point on the coast and drive east for more than 20 hours at highway speeds and still be in a location that saw one of its warmest winters on record.
In Texas, a new record was set for the nation’s warmest winter day on Feb. 26 when a weather station at the Falcon Dam on the Rio Grande reached 106 degrees, according to the National Weather Service. A stretch of about 30 miles along the river saw temperatures soar into the triple digits that day. In much of the West, if it wasn’t record warm, it was the second warmest winter period on record, he said. “There wasn’t really any corner of the West that escaped highly anomalous warmth," he said, except for some areas in the California valleys that saw periods of heavy fog that prevented records from being set.
Around the nation
Wild swings in temperature were noted even within weather service office regions. In Wisconsin, the La Crosse weather service noted a 98-degree range between its warmest and coldest temperatures, from minus 32 degrees near Owen on Jan. 25 to 66 degrees at Prairie du Chien on Feb. 17.
Similar swings between hot and cold temperatures were seen in other locations, including South Bend, Indiana, which flipped from a low of minus 10 on Feb. 1 to a high of 65 on Feb. 18th. Overall, it was the region's 45th coldest winter since records began in 1893, the weather service said.
Among the summaries of the December through February period emerging from weather service regional offices this week were the following highlights:
- Phoenix – Not only was it the warmest winter on record, but March also started warmer than normal. The high temperature on March 1 was the earliest 93-degree day on record, beating the record set in 1972 by four days.
- Great Falls, Montana – Five of the seven monitored stations saw the most ever 50-degree days this winter. In Bozeman, 37 days of daily highs topped 50 degrees, contributing to its record warm winter.
- Sheridan, Wyoming – The daily high temperature beat 50 degrees 44 times and 60 degrees 20 times, both setting records.
More wild swings are looming in early March as the Eastern U.S. experiences a major pattern change.
See the maps
The official climatological summaries from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, parent agency of the weather service, aren't expected to be released for a few days, but several preliminary maps illustrate seasonal and daily temperature trends over the three-month meteorological winter.
Wildfire risks rising
In many locations, meteorologists are also concerned about rising wildfire risk due to drier-than-normal and warmer-than-normal temperatures, as well as the arrival of spring weather.
Year-to-date, the nation has recorded 7,895 fires and 385,991 acres burned, well above the 10-year average to date of 4,323 fires and 91,529 acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
"Numbers alone do not tell the whole story, but they do reinforce an important truth: Conditions, fuels and weather patterns vary widely across the country at any given time," the fire center stated in its Feb. 27 weekly update.
Fingerprints of climate change
Although natural variability played a role, Swain sees the fingerprints of climate change in several aspects of winter weather, including cold snaps. “We don’t get winters like that very often anymore in the Eastern U.S.,” so they seem more unusual to the people experiencing the winter weather, he said. While many cold daily high temperatures were set − along with consecutive days with temperatures below freezing − there was no widespread trend this winter among locations with their coldest winter ever.
It's also noteworthy that the West exceeded what has become “a high bar” for higher-than-normal temperatures, Swain said.
Without climate change contributions, it's almost impossible that the United States would have seen the extreme plumes of water vapor that contributed to heavy snow and flooding in some locations or the low snowpack in parts of the West, he said. That's just the "not so cold, hard truth."
Dinah Voyles Pulver, a national correspondent for USA TODAY, covers climate change, weather, the environment and other news. Reach her at [email protected] or @dinahvp on Bluesky or X or dinahvp.77 on Signal.