According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the European Union's (EU) Earth observation program, reported on Tuesday that last February was the fifth warmest on record, with temperatures 1.49 °C above pre-industrial levels. "With global temperatures reaching 1.49 °C above pre-industrial levels (the fifth warmest February ever recorded), Europe experienced strong temperature contrasts," said Samantha Burgess, Head of Strategy at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), in a statement. Burgess also referred to the series of intense storms and precipitation experienced in Western Europe, a region that includes Spain, and North Africa, which caused "widespread damage and loss of life and livelihoods," as confirmed by Copernicus. These rains were due to "atmospheric rivers (narrow bands of very moist air) that caused record rainfall and widespread flooding in Western and Southern Europe," according to Burgess. In February of this year, "much of Western and Southern Europe was wetter than usual, while the rest of the continent was mostly drier than usual," noted Copernicus' latest bulletin. Outside the Old Continent, there was more moisture than usual in much of Australia, southeastern Brazil, northern North America, and parts of Central Asia, while regions that were drier than usual include the southern U.S., northeastern Canada, the Middle East, Central Asia, and eastern Antarctica, with conditions being "cold in Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, and northern Russia". The fifth warmest Northern Hemisphere winter Globally, the last Northern Hemisphere winter, which spanned from December 2025 to February 2026, was the fifth warmest, as the planet's average temperature was over half a degree (0.51 °C) higher than the average for the 1991-2020 period. However, in Europe, "last winter was one of the two coldest in the last 13 years, at 0.09 °C above the 1991-2020 average," stated the Copernicus bulletin. In the sea, the sea surface temperature between 60° S and 60° N was 20.88 °C in February 2026, the second highest value for that month. Temperatures favoring storms According to Copernicus, there was a notable temperature variation between the cold areas in the center and west of the North Atlantic and the warm subtropical North Atlantic, a circumstance that may have contributed to the development of the storms that reached Europe. At the poles, Arctic sea ice experienced an average extent 5% below the average, the third lowest extent recorded for a February, while in the Antarctic Ocean, it is "likely" that its summer minimum was reached on February 22, according to the Copernicus bulletin. The final data on Antarctic sea ice will be confirmed at the end of March, but the February figure is close to the 48-year average, contrasting with the "record or near-record" lows of the previous four years.
