Labrador coast warming
Scroll down for Cartwright, Labrador warming topic
Historical Weather
1950: Lightning shot through the United Church manse near Bala, ON, within 2 m of 2 sleeping children. They escaped injury, as did a baby in an iron crib. A door frame of the manse and its rear porch windows shattered and a 1-m-long piece of wood was driven across a room into a china cabinet. The lightning strikes also burnt out all of Bala's electrical connections and blew out a transformer.
Hello all, hope you are having a great weekend. Woke up to a cool -9C (16F) this morning which is about 6C below normal (11F) and we should get to a high of -1C or if we're lucky 0C (around 32F). Can't wait for more seasonal temps to start coming in by midweek!
Last year we had our warmest March since 1946 and this year we're paying for it! Average March temperature of 2010 for Montreal is 7.8C and this year we're closer to 2.3C so far. A full 5.5C lower.
Environment Canada forecast for my area
Normals: 6C, -3C
Cartwright, Labrador
click for a much larger image
This is part 1 of an eventual 5-part series on temperature variations experienced all over Canada. I've selected regions far and wide apart to show a broader scale. I've also tried to select communities or cities with very different weather.
Located approximately 750km NNW of St-John's, Newfoundland this community experiences firsthand the effects of climate change. Its climate experiences mild summers and very cold winters being at 53 degrees North. The village is glued on the coast of the Labrador Sea and in normal winters, experiences several true blizzards. This region receives extreme amounts of snow in the order of over 400cm (13.1 feet) but just to the southwest of the village the average annual snowfall exceeds 500cm (5m or 16.4feet!) Average temperatures range from -9C in January to a balmy 18 or 19C in July. Of course, there is an atlantic influence which moderates the temperatures. You only need to go approximately 500km inland and average January temperatures are closer to a frigid -20C to -25C. Global warming is very evident in this area. Five of the 8 warmest years since record-keeping began in 1938 have been in the last 15 years and since the early 1990's the climate has warmed significantly (see mean temperature graph). A brief cooldown took place for the 20 year period between 1970 and 1990. Is this a coming trend to increasingly warm temperatures? All signs point to yes. The nearby sea has less and less ice during winter every year which is a major contributor to increasingly warm temperatures in spring.
Trends per decade
January high +0.05C, low -0.04C
February high -0.01C, low -0.12C
March high +0.08C, low -0.11C
April high +0.21C, low +0.16C
May high +0.11C, low +0.04C
June high +0.11C, low +0.11C
July high -0.18C, low -0.06C
August high +0.16C, low +0.1C
September high +0.03C, low +0.03C
October high +0.04C, low +0.1C
November high +0.11C, low +0.07C
December high +0.18C, low +0.18C
Overall +0.05C
Precipitation +20.1mm or 0.79 inches(that's per decade!)
Yearly mean temperature
The slight cooling trend of the 70's and 80's lowers the overall trend but you can see how significant the warming has been since around 1990! 2010 is the warmest year on record (since 1938) which broke the old record standing way back in 2006 and that in itself tied the even older record from 2004. (exxagerated humour intended) This graph doesn't really say anything at all but it makes me speculate and adds further proof that the climate is warming. This warming is probably amplified in the latter part of the year from the less extensive ice cover we are witnessing in the arctic every year. I doubt this warming trend of such extreme amplitude can continue unabated for several years but nothing is set in the stone and nothing is ever expected when it comes to the climate...
Overall precipitation trends
This data was taken from Environment Canada and all I have done is transmitted the data into readable graphs and make it easier to understand. The second part of this series will be Montreal, Quebec.
"The weather is always interesting." - Jesse Ferrell
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