MAIN WEATHER AND CLIMATE TRAITS IN THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE AS OF APRIL 2025
The first days of April still brought new records of heat to the ETR. Daily maxima of air temperature were recorded on the Volga, in the Cis-Urals and in the Southern Urals, driving the thermometers to the values close to +25° in a number of places. But by the middle of the first decade, frosts came there again to replace the records of heat with those of cold, and the average air temperature in the first decade turned out to be subnormal in the central and southern regions of the ETR.
At the beginning of the second decade, cold weather with new record-breaking minima of air temperature still persisted in the north-west, e.g., in the Pskov, Leningrad and Arkhangelsk Regions and in the Republic of Karelia, but in mid-April, the unprecedented warmth arrived there with new record-breaking temperature maxima in numerous locations. April in the ETR ended up with yet one arrival of cold weather, and frosts or even record colds spread to the very south – Crimea, the Volgograd, Rostov and Astrakhan Regions, and Kalmykia.
In most of the territory beyond the Urals, the weather in April was warmer than usual; in the north-east, extreme heat persisted for most of the month. In mid-April, record high temperatures above +30° were observed from Omsk to Irkutsk in the south of Siberia: such thermometer readings were only measured there in summer of select years before. The month concluded with record high temperatures in the north of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, in Evenkiya and Yakutia.
MAIN WEATHER AND CLIMATE TRAITS IN THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE AS OF MARCH 2025
All March long, abnormally warm weather prevailed in the ETR, with the average air temperature 4-8° higher than normal in each of the three decades and numerous temperature maxima recorded all the way from the Russian North to the North Caucasus and Crimea, up to +25° in some places. The south of Russia was a single exception where the extreme frosts would come on occasional days. For instance, a new absolute minimum of air temperature for March equal to -23.4° was set in Mineralnye Vody.
As a result, this March became the second warmest in the 135-year history of regular meteorological observations in the ETR; the weather was even warmer in March 2020 only. In Central Russia, March was the warmest in meteorological chronicle, and in the south, it reproduced the achievement of the same 2020.
The picture in the Urals and to the east of them was quite different: there, warmth and cold were alternating. In the first decade, the weather was basically cold, and the average temperature anomalies in Siberia and in the Far East reached -3…-6°. In the second decade, warmth occupied the Urals and Siberia (with anomalies of +4…8°), and new temperature maxima were recorded in the southern Urals and in the south of Krasnoyarsk Territory. At the same time, cold captured the Far East, especially its northern territories (anomalies of up to -4…-6°). And in the last decade, warmth remained were it was and extended to the north of the Far East, but abnormal colds came to Yakutia and the south of the Far East.