City sets another unwanted record By: Kevin Rollason Posted: 5:06 PM CDT Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2025

Winnipeg has blazed its way to its smokiest year on record — and there are still nearly three months remaining in the wildfire season.

The city had recorded 306 smoke hours as of Tuesday, compared with 304 in 1961.

“We’re not even through the wildfire season, and we’re already the smokiest,” Environment and Climate Change Canada scientist Christy Climenhaga said.

“The smoke this summer has been pretty relentless. We’ve had fires since the beginning of the season. It has been a very active smoke year in Manitoba.”

The record comes days after Winnipeg recorded its smokiest month ever, with 189 hours in July. That was 26 more than the 163 in May 1961.

Environment Canada meteorologist Crawford Luke said 2025 is the smokiest Winnipeg has been in 72 years of record keeping.

“We have been counting smoke hours from April 1 through Oct. 31 to try to reflect smoke from the wildfire seasons of the past,” Luke said Wednesday.

“A smoke hour is defined as an hourly observation where the weather observer observed the visibility to be six miles (9.65 kilometres) or less, with smoke as the visibility reduction. These observations are taken at the top of the hour at Winnipeg International Airport.”

Environment Canada began recording smoke hours in 1953, when it recorded 66. There have been 13 years where the smoke hours were recorded as zero — the latest was 2020.

While, for the most part, the number of hours remained in the low double digits for decades, they have been much higher than that in four of the past five years, including 2025.

The 262 hours in 2021 was the highest count since 1961, and the first time since then that it was a three-digit number. In 2023, 125 hours were recorded, and 108 were recorded in 2024.

There was only one hour of smoke in 2022, when Winnipeg set a record with its wettest year, with 739.9 millimetres of rain and snow recorded up to Oct. 24.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca

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Kevin Rollason
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Kevin Rollason is a general assignment reporter at the Free Press. He graduated from Western University with a Masters of Journalism in 1985 and worked at the Winnipeg Sun until 1988, when he joined the Free Press. He has served as the Free Press’s city hall and law courts reporter and has won several awards, including a National Newspaper Award. Read more about Kevin.

Every piece of reporting Kevin produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.