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It wasn’t your imagination. This February really has been the coldest ever.

With an average temperature of -14.7 C, it beat February 1979 — when the average temperature was -13.6 C — as the coldest Montreal has ever seen.

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Blame it on the West Coast, which had a strong high-pressure system that caused a peak in the jet stream. “The jet stream rose in Western Canada and brought arctic air down to the eastern coast,” said Adrien Julien, a meteorologist at Environment Canada.

The Gazette analyzed historical weather data going back to 1953 to find just how cold this February was according to the past. The chart below illustrates this.

Last month, we reported that January 2015 was colder compared to recent years, but not so bad when looked at a longer time scale. This February, however, bucked this historic trend. Oddly enough, temperatures were above normal in January almost everywhere else on the planet.