February's monthly statistics from Environment Canada were cruising towards a near-record breaking cold, but a last-minute warmup managed to save the month from the record books.
That's what Environment Canada's data tells us as they kept an eye on the southeast and its climate over the past month.
Environment Canada Meteorologist Danielle Desjardins lays out what the area felt on the shortest month of the year.
"No surprise here, it was cold. We saw temperatures at our stations between 3.7 and 7.4° below normal for this time of year. So in Estevan for example, it was 6.2° below normal which put it at the 11th coldest February on record."
The February could be split into two parts with Desjardins saying the end of February warm up kept the total statistics more even.
"It was kind of a tale of two portions of February. First three weeks extremely cold, but then we had a massive warm up for the final week of February. If we only took those first three weeks into consideration, Estevan would have ended up in the top 3-4 coldest Februarys. But because of that warm up, it ended up a little bit more moderate, but that's not to take away from the fact that that cold anap was a prolonged one and for the most part February was extremely cold."
Meanwhile, the skies were relatively empty of any precipitation with Desjardins taking a look at some of the snow that fell.
"For precipitation, Estevan only received about half of it's normal precipitation for February. Normally you receive 14.9mm and February ended up with 7.8mm, so ended up on the dry side. Some stations in the southeast end in central Saskatchewan ended up below normal."
"There was one specific snowfall event. It was February 5th to 6th in the Southwest and kind of extending up into the Moose Jaw, Regina, Yorkton area. That brought a lot of snow in one event up to 20 centimeters, so some of those stations ended up above normal for February. But for all intents and purposes, other than that one event, February was pretty dry."