Pittsburgh Weather: February Was One Soggy Month, But Most Memorable Moment Is Wind Storm

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PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- February is now in the books, along with meteorological winter. Bring on the warm weather right?

Well, not exactly, but let's just focus on a recap of the month and the season that was.

The month of February continued the trend of being warm and wet. Overall, the month saw temperatures warmer than average, and while not among the top 10 wettest, the month was plenty wet with a couple of records being set. In the end, though it wasn't really rain or heat that everyone will remember the month for.

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Those Winds:

What will be memorable for this month? The big wind storm that happened on Feb. 24.

As a powerful low pressure system passed by the area, followed closely by high pressure moving in behind. This led to wind speeds topping 60 mph, including the strongest non-thunderstorm wind speeds recorded in the Pittsburgh area in over 10 years.

The storms knocked out power to thousands in the area with some possibly not seeing power restored nearly a week after the storm. Forget sleet and freezing rain, just the sustained powerful winds with the random gust of 50mph or more was enough to cripple the power grid.

One Soggy Month, and Season:

While February will be remembered for the wind storm, you can't forget about the rain and soggy conditions that have continued from last year. The airport recorded 4.13 inches of rain for the month. That's about a fifth of an inch outside of the top 10 wettest Februarys ever. That's 1.74 inches wetter than average. Of that, 12.9 inches fell as snow.

We had a couple of record rains for the month, including seeing 0.73 inches of rain on Feb. 12, and 0.86 inches of rain that fell on Feb. 20.

With the end of February comes an end of Meteorological Winter as well. Stats from there shows a top ten finish when it came to total precipitation. From Dec. 1 through Feb. 28, the airport recorded 12.23 inches of total rain. That's about 0.8 inches behind last year's meteorological winter pace.

Temperatures Remained Above Average:

For the month, temperatures remained on the mild side with us being 2.6 degrees warmer than average for the month. The average temperature was 33.7 degrees. The average is reached by adding both the day's high and low temperatures before dividing by two. Two of the three winter months were above average with January being a couple of degrees colder than normal.

Overall, our winter season ranks 58th, tied with three other years, out of 145 years on record.

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