AMHERST, Mass. (WWLP) – You’ll remember this February forever. This past February was the coldest February ever recorded in 180 years of record keeping in Amherst.

In Amherst, the average temperature for the month was just 11.2 degrees, about 15 degrees colder than normal. You may never live through another February this cold and it’ll be one to tell your children about.

Only one February that came close to being as cold.

“Before this February the coldest benchmark in the past was 1934 where many locations across the region established cold records for the month of February and we’ve shattered those records,” said Michael Rawlins, Climatologist at UMass. Amherst. Official records in Amherst date back to 1893, while unofficial measurements continue back to 1835.

It wasn’t just the coldest February reported ever here in western Massachusetts, but also in Hartford and Worcester. In Boston it was the second coldest February ever.

People 22News spoke with weren’t suprised we broke the record.

“Well I can believe that, I know that there were twelve days (in a row) that it never got to 32 degrees and that’s a long stretch to have to deal with all the cold,” said Jane Ames from Sunderland.

Now many are wondering what to expect in March.

• We can guarantee that the amount of daylight will keep getting longer. On March 31st the sun sets close to 7:15pm and we gain an hour and a quarter of daylight this month from start to finish.
• We also usually get snow in March, on average 8.7 inches of it.
• High temperatures average in the 40s with overnights in the upper 20s in a normal March.

But this particular March is off to a cold start.

“I think that the snow is going to be here for quite a while. It’s probably going to be here through part of May just melting,” said Melissa Vigue from South Deerfield.

Early indications from the Climate Prediction Center as well as some of our long term computer models point to a colder than average month ahead.