In the last ten-day period of the year, very warm weather for December prevailed in Ukraine. With the exception of the eastern half of the country, where freezing temperatures were close to normal, the air temperature was positive and significantly exceeded climatic indicators. On warm days, the positive anomaly of average daily temperatures reached 6-12 °C.
The average regional air temperature over a ten-day period almost throughout the country turned out to be 1.4 – 5.4 °C above the norm, in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions – close to the norm, and ranged from minus 5.0 °C in the far east to plus 4.5 °С in the south-west of the country.
On warm days, the maximum air temperature in the eastern, northeastern, Zhytomyr and Poltava regions increased to 4-8 °С, in the rest of the territory – up to 9-14 °С, in the southern regions of the Odesa region – up to plus 15-16 °C. The minimum air temperature dropped to minus 3-7 °С, in the eastern, Zaporizhzhya, Dipropetrovsk, Poltava, Sumy, Lviv, Transcarpathian and Ivano-Frankivsk regions – to minus 8-13 °С, in the Luhansk region to minus 18 °С.
Precipitation within 2-6 days, in the Carpathian mountains within 7-8 days, in the form of drizzle, fog, rain, snow and sleet were observed throughout the country. The average regional number in most regions ranged from 123 to 160% of the ten-day norm (from 20 to 26 mm), in the Zhytomyr, Volyn, Lviv and Transcarpathian regions – 200-229% of the ten-day norm (from 30 to 61 mm). In the Mykolayiv, Kherson, Zaporozhzhya, Vinnytsya, Chernivtsi, Ivano-Frankivsk, Poltava, Chernihiv and Sumy regions, the amount of precipitation was close to the norm and amounted to 10-19 mm (Fig. 2). The daily maximum precipitation in some areas of the western regions reached 23-32 mm.
As a result of the abnormally warm weather during the ten-day period, weak growth processes were observed on winter crops almost throughout the entire territory, with the exception of the eastern regions, where the level of average and maximum temperatures was lower. The condition of the plants is mostly good; in the Kherson region, in some areas, damage to winter wheat crops by agricultural pests was noted. According to the observations of agrometeorologists in the third ten-day period of December, some fields of the Kharkiv, Poltava, Lugansk and Chernihiv regions contained an ice crust with a thickness of 3 to 8 mm, the extent of distribution – from 40 to 90% of the field area.