The 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.
