Moscow saw unprecedented warm weather early Thursday, capping a week of record highs that are forecast to extend into January.
The temperature hit a record 8.5 degrees Celsius at 3 a.m. Thursday, 1.9 degrees higher than the same time last year, a Moscow weather bureau official told Interfax.
The official said the temperature was expected to reach 10 C in parts of Moscow on Thursday. It was not immediately clear whether any new record had been set.
The average winter temperature for Moscow is minus 4 C.
Moscow broke a 100-year-old record Wednesday when the temperature rose to 7.1 C, Interfax reported. The last high was 6.1 C, set in 1898.
The temperature is expected to start falling Friday, dipping to zero C over the weekend and remaining there next week. “But by the end of the week it will get cold, and we will be closer to more typical winter conditions,” Dmitry Kiktev, deputy head of the federal weather bureau, told reporters Wednesday.
He said daytime temperatures would hover near minus 3 C for the last two weeks of December.
January, he said, would be warmer than usual in Moscow, but the winter in Siberia would stay “quite normal and invigorating.”
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