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|400x400px]] A humid continental climate is a climate region defined by Russo-German climatologist Wladimir Köppen in 1900, typified by four distinct seasons and large seasonal temperature differences, with warm to hot (and often humid) summers, and cold (sometimes severely cold in the northern areas) and snowy winters. Precipitation is usually distributed throughout the year, but often these regions do have dry seasons. The definition of this climate in terms of temperature is as follows: the mean temperature of the coldest month must be below or depending on the isotherm, and there must be at least four months whose mean temperatures are at or above . In addition, the location in question must not be semi-arid or desert climate. The cooler Dfb, Dwb, and Dsb subtypes are also known as hemiboreal climates. Although amount of snowfall is not a factor used in defining the humid continental climate, snow during the winter in this type of climate is almost a guarantee, either intermittently throughout the winter months near the southern or coastal margins, or persistently throughout the winter months elsewhere in the climate zone.
Humid continental climates are generally found between latitudes 40° N and 60° N, within the central and northeastern portions of North America, Europe, and Asia. Occasionally, they can also be found at higher elevations above other more temperate climate types. They are rare in the Southern Hemisphere, limited to isolated high altitude locations, due to the larger ocean area at that latitude, smaller land mass, and the consequent greater maritime moderation.
In the Northern Hemisphere, some of the humid continental climates, typically in around Hokkaido, Sakhalin Island, northeastern mainland Europe, Scandinavia, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland are closer to the sea and heavily maritime-influenced and comparable to , with relatively cool summers, significant year-round precipitation (including high amounts of snow) and winters being just below the freezing mark (too cold for such a classification). More extreme and inland humid continental climates, sometimes known as "hyper-continental" climates, are found in northeast China, southern Siberia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, most of the southern interior of Canada, and the Upper Midwest, where temperatures in the winter resemble those of adjacent subarctic climates (with long, drier, generally very cold winters) but have longer and generally warmer summers (in occasional cases, hot summers). A more moderate variety, found in places like Honshu, east-central China, the Korean Peninsula, parts of Eastern Europe, parts of southern Ontario, much of the American Midwest, and the Northeast US, the climate combines hotter summer maxima and greater humidity (similar to those found in adjacent humid subtropical climates) and moderately cold winters and more intermittent snow cover (averaging somewhat below freezing, too cold for a more temperate classification), and is less extreme than the most inland hyper-continental variety.
Second letter in the classification symbol defines seasonal rainfall as follows:
In the Eastern Hemisphere, this climate regime is found within interior Eurasia and east-central Asia. Within Europe, the Dfa climate type is present near the Black Sea in southern Ukraine, the Southern Federal District of Russia, southern Moldova, Serbia, parts of southern Romania, and Bulgaria, but tends to be drier and can be even semi-arid in these places. In East Asia, this climate exhibits a tendency with much higher precipitation in summer than in winter, and due to the effects of the strong Siberian High much colder winter temperatures than similar latitudes around the world, however with lower snowfall, the exception being western Japan with its heavy snowfall. Tōhoku, between Tokyo and Hokkaidō and Western coast of Japan also has a climate with Köppen classification Dfa, but is wetter even than that part of North America with this climate type. A variant which has dry winters and hence relatively lower snowfall with monsoonal type summer rainfall is to be found in northern China including Manchuria and parts of North China, far East of Russia, and over much of the Korean Peninsula; it has the Köppen classification Dwa. Much of central Asia, northwestern China, and southern Mongolia has a thermal regime similar to that of the Dfa climate type, but these regions receive so little precipitation that they are more often classified as steppes ( BSk) or deserts ( BWk).
Dsa climates are rare; they are generally restricted to elevated areas adjacent to mid-latitude Mediterranean climate regions with a Csa climate well inland to ensure hot summers and cold winters. They are generally found in the highly elevated areas of south-eastern Turkey (Hakkâri), north-western Iran, northern Iraq, parts of Central Asia, parts of the High Atlas mountain range in central Morocco and very small parts of the Intermountain West in the United States.
This climate zone does not exist at all in the Southern Hemisphere, where the continents either do not penetrate low enough in latitude or Southern Cone to have any place that gets the combination of snowy winters and hot summers. Marine influences are very strong around 40°S and such preclude Dfa, Dwa, and Dsa climates from existing in the southern hemisphere.
The warm summer version of the humid continental climate covers a much larger area than the hot subtype. In North America, the climate zone covers from about 42°N to 50°N latitude mostly east of 100°W, including parts of Southern Ontario, the southern half of Quebec, The Maritimes, and Newfoundland, as well as the northern United States from eastern North Dakota east to Maine. However, it can be found as far north as 54°N, and further west in the Canadian Prairie Provinces and below 40°N in the high Appalachians. In Europe, this subtype reaches its most northerly latitude in Bodø at the 67°N.
High-altitude locations such as Flagstaff, Arizona, Aspen, Colorado and Los Alamos, New Mexico in the western United States exhibit local Dfb climates. The south-central and southwestern Prairie Provinces also fits the Dfb criteria from a thermal profile, but because of semi-arid precipitation portions of it are grouped into the BSk category.
In Europe, it is found in much of Central Europe: Germany (in the east and southeast part of the country), Austria (generally below ), Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary (generally above ), Croatia (mostly Slavonia region), in much of Eastern Europe: Ukraine (the whole country except the Black Sea coast), Belarus, Russia (mostly central part of European Russia), south and central parts of the Nordic countries not bathed by the Atlantic Ocean or North Sea: Sweden (historical regions of Svealand and Götaland), Denmark, Finland (south end, including the three largest cities), Norway (most populated area), all Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and also in parts of: Romania (generally above ), Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkey and in the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland, (generally above ). It has little warming or precipitation effects from the northern Atlantic. The cool summer subtype is marked by mild summers, long cold winters and less precipitation than the hot summer subtype; however, short periods of extreme heat are not uncommon. Northern Japan has a similar climate.
In Asia, this climate type is found in northern Kazakhstan, southern Siberia, parts of Mongolia, northern China, and highland elevations in the Korea. Like its hot-summer counterpart, these climates are typically dry in the winter and bitterly cold due to the Siberian High (often with winter temperatures comparable to their nearby subarctic climates), while summers are warm and long enough to avoid classification as a subarctic climate.
In the Southern Hemisphere, it exists in well-defined areas only in the Southern Alps of New Zealand, in the Snowy Mountains of Australia in Kiandra, New South Wales and the Andes Mountains of Argentina and Chile.
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