U.S. Had the Coldest February in Over 30 Years – Demonstrating That Nature Is Still in Control of the Climate

As we have previously mentioned on ClimateRealism, last month’s winter storms in the United States caused record subzero temperatures, power outages for millions of homeowners when “green energy” failed,  and more than two dozen deaths.

It was also the coldest February in over three decades. This was mainly due to the “polar vortex” blasting extremely cold air across the central United States.

The cold air in the lower 48 states did not come at the expense of Alaska. Alaska experienced its coldest February since 1999.

The main driver for the cold weather across the contiguous U.S. during February was a strongly negative Arctic Oscillation (AO) during the first half of the month. This may have been the result of a sudden stratospheric warming event that occurred in January. The negative AO pattern favors a cold air outbreak over the central U.S., often referred to as a “polar vortex”.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) officially reported that during February, the average contiguous U.S. temperature was 30.6°F, 3.2°F below the 20th-century average. This ranked as the 19th-coldest February in the 127-year period of record and was the coldest February since 1989.

At the same time, another metric, the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) reported even colder results than the data from the highly compromised weather station network operated by NOAA. While the USCRN uses state-of-the-art measurement systems and is far removed from Urban Heat Island (UHI) corrupting forces, it is seldom used in press releases by NOAA.

The USCRN shows a -4.32°F negative deviation in the average US temperature anomaly for February 2021 which is -1.12°F colder than NOAA’s problematic surface temperature network. A quick scan of the data shows this to be the highest magnitude monthly temperature drop since the start of the USCRN network in 2005.

Source: NOAA USCRN time series plotter

While this coldest February on record for over 30 years does not disprove the claim of “man-made global warming,” it does show that the warming is so minor that an area the size of the entire United States can still set or approach a “coldest ever” record for a time period for as long as a full month.

This event is a strong indicator that nature, not man-made emissions, is still the deciding factor in temperature.