February Weather Report

(In case you're wondering about the track condition, check the post just after this one.  Doug has been hard at work and has done wonders!  Thank you, Doug!)

Lee Warnick sends out this weather recap each month as part of a Rexburg Weather Group, and has given me permission to post it on this blog.  It's interesting to view weather variations.

FEBRUARY PRECIPITATION: 

Precipitation: 0.07 / 9 percent of average

Snowfall: 2.5 / 28 percent of average

2018 annual precipitation (2 of 12 months): 1.39 / 79 percent of average

2017-18 water year precipitation (5 of 12 months): 3.49 / 71 percent of average

2017-18 season snowfall: 32.1 / 66 percent of average

     • This, remarkably and strangely, was our driest February on record, breaking the previous mark of 0.10 inch set in 2002 (right in the middle of our intense millennial drought). 

     • How remarkably and strangely? We had our driest-ever February despite having at least a trace of rain or snow fall on 16 of the month's 28 days (and all but two days in the month's final two weeks!). Some of the systems that dumped epochal amounts of snow in parts of Montana and brought much-needed significant snowfalls to Utah left us almost completely high and dry. Under normal circumstances, we had more than enough opportunities to reach normal precip, not break the all-time record for least precip. Salt Lake City had normal precip and Great Falls three times the normal precip (including nearly 3 feet of snow). Pocatello and Boise managed 55-65 percent of their normals, so the record-breaking dearth in Idaho Falls and Rexburg was the white tiger. This is one of the strangest anomalies I've seen in all my years of weather-watching.

     • Our weird streak of alternating months of wet and dry weather has reached 7. As you can gather from all the brown numbers above, dry months have been drier than wet months have been wet over this run. And with the wild start to March (some storms finally delivered!), this odd-even streak has a decent chance to continue -- we've received more than half of March's normal precip in the first 4 days.

FEBRUARY TEMPERATURES:

High temperatures: 34.5 / 1.2 degrees above normal

Low temperatures: 20.2 / 5.5 degrees above normal

Zero or below days: 0     Normal: 4.1

Highest wind gust: 53 mph on the 17th

Number of windy days: 9    Normal: 4.0

Highest temperature: 48 on the 8th

Lowest temperature: 4 on the 20th

Lowest wind chill: -8 on the 20th

     • February's average high temps were about the same as January's, which means February's were a bit closer to what we're used to. Not so with low temps, which continued way, way above normal for the 3rd time in the past 4 months.

     • We've dropped to zero or below just 3 times this winter. If we stay here, which is likely, this will be the 3rd lowest seasonal total of zero-or-below days in the 47 years of Rexburg's weather annals.

     • The first half of February continued January's prevailing balmy pattern, and we could well have been flirting with all-time records had it continued (notice how the snow melted really fast and early this year). But the final two weeks were colder than normal, evening things out somewhat. In February's first two weeks, high temps were below freezing just once (Rexburg's normal high temp doesn't rise above freezing until Feb. 11); they were at or below freezing on 12 of the month's final 14 days.

     • It was also windy in February, which often signals a stormy weather pattern with plenty of snow or rain. But wait until you read the news about February precip!