Russia's climate
The most well known feature of the Russian climate is its very cold winter, brought about by the country’s high latitudes (40-75°N), vast land mass and lack of any topographic obstructions to protect it from arctic winds sweeping across its long, north-facing and often frozen coastline. The country is bounded by high mountains along its southern and eastern flank but the west is exposed to occasional winter incursions of milder Atlantic air, so that winters become progressively more severe eastwards (10).
The extreme continental nature of the Russian climate means that the difference between mid-winter and mid-summer monthly mean temperature is large and typically at least 30°C, so that summers are warm even, for a short time, within the Arctic Circle (10).
The transition from winter to summer and from summer back to winter is very quick so that effectively there are only 2 seasons over most of Russia (10).
Annual precipitation is mostly not particularly high and is spread throughout the year with a summer convective peak. Examples of annual average precipitation are 690 mm at Moscow but only 400-500 mm further east at Chelybinsk, Novosibirsk and Irkutsk. Most winter precipitation in Russia falls as snow but this, though frequent, is rarely very heavy and strong winds often sweep the ground bare of snow (10).
Average January monthly temperatures vary between 0 and -5°C (Northern Caucasus) and between –40 and -50°C (Republic Saha, Yakutia) where the minimal temperatures reach -65-70°С. Average monthly temperatures of July vary from 1°C at northern coast of Siberia to 24-25°C in Prikaspijskaya lowland. The greatest amount of precipitation falls out in mountains of Caucasus (up to 2,000 mm per year), in the south of the Far East (up to 1,000 mm), and also in a forest zone of East European plain (up to 700 mm). The minimum precipitation falls at semiarid areas of Prikaspijskaya lowland (about 150 mm per year) (11).