January 13, 2005
By Anatoly Medetsky
Staff Writer
Moscow is enjoying the warmest January in recorded history, and the weather is expected to continue to look more like April for the next few days as balmy Atlantic winds sweep across European Russia and keep temperatures comfortably above freezing.
"These have been the warmest first 10 days of January since the beginning of weather monitoring in the country in 1879," Tatyana Pozdnyakova of the Moscow weather bureau said Wednesday. "Usually air temperatures begin rising above zero after March 27. This temperature is characteristic of the first days of April."
The average temperature from Jan. 1 to Jan. 10 was 0.5 degrees Celsius, while the normal temperature would be minus 8.5 degrees, Pozdnyakova said.
Temperatures hit a high of 5.2 degrees on Sunday, breaking a record of 2.9 degrees set for Jan. 9 in 1976, she said. A record was also set Saturday when temperature rose to 5.1 degrees. The previous record for Jan. 8 was 3.7 degrees in 1932.
The first 10 days of 2005 may be the warmest spell in more than a century, but the temperature never reached the record high of 5.6 degrees set in 1992.
The warm weather is expected to last through Saturday, with a chance of snowfall Sunday and Monday. By the middle of next week, temperatures will be fluctuating between minus 5 and minus 15 degrees, Pozdnyakova said.
Warm air traveled to Russia with the same Atlantic storm that brought gale-force winds and flooding this month to large swaths of Europe, including St. Petersburg and the Pskov and Kaliningrad regions, Pozdnyakova said.
A low pressure front drew air from North Africa and the Equator over the Atlantic and spread it over Europe so quickly that the air was prevented from cooling, she said.
This winter is so warm that a bear in St. Petersburg Zoo has woken from her hibernation two months early, while another has not gone to sleep at all, Interfax reported Wednesday. A major hockey match was postponed in St. Petersburg on Tuesday because the rink melted, Sovietsky Sport reported.
In Moscow, several ice sculpture exhibitions have melted, including the Olimpiiskaya Simfoniya on Vasilievsky Spusk that opened Jan. 5 to tout Moscow's bid to host the 2012 Olympics.
Similar warm spells occur every five to seven years, the Federal Weather Monitoring Center said Tuesday.
Pozdnyakova said the warmth this year may be an effect of global warming. "Climatic changes chiefly affect winters," she said.
Moscow is better known for its bitterly cold winters, which are credited with helping Russians defeat Nazi troops when temperatures dropped to minus 43 degrees during the Battle of Moscow on Jan. 3, 1942, and for driving Napoleon's army out of Moscow in 1812.
Moscow's coldest spell for January was recorded in 1893, when the temperature averaged minus 23 degrees.
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/01/13/011.html