February 2016 was second warmest on record
Posted Mar 1, 2016 7:53 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It wasn’t just the flames of love keeping Calgary toasty last month.
The city saw the second warmest February on record, since bookkeeping started in the 1880s.
No, it wasn’t one big chinook — El Nino is to blame.
The second month of the year is usually one of the coolest, but this time around we saw an average temperature of 1.6 degrees, only beat out by February 1977, which saw an average of 2 degrees.
“Our average daytime high was just above 7 degrees,” Breakfast Television Meteorologist Andrew Schultz says, adding we got a little lucky. “Certainly with El Nino, you generally can see the precipitation up. Not always the case. We did not see the precipitation up, but the signature for warmth into the region — we did feel that this year,” he said.
Calgary typically sees 13 centimetres of snowfall in February, but only trace amounts fell time around.
“However, I’ll remind everybody that back in 1998, it was a very white St. Patrick’s Day, where we had 100 centimetres of snow, so not quite out of the woods yet,” Schultz said.
He says once March passes, maybe then we can breathe a sigh of relief.
