Extreme weather events ring up 2021 list

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This article was published 16/12/2021 (1458 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Scorching drought, freezing cold snaps and unrelenting wildfires all made news this year — and all made Environment and Climate Change Canada’s 2021 list of top 10 weather events.

The list, released Thursday, includes a hurricane in Newfoundland, hail storm in Calgary, and a few weather patterns that hit Manitoba: namely, the deep freeze that blanketed Canada in February, wildfires fought in the province and beyond, and the drought that affected local farmers.

While the COVID-19 pandemic dominated headlines over the last two years, a relief similar to vaccine uptake news is nowhere to be found for those following climate change, said senior climatologist David Phillips said Thursday.

“What I said last year, there’s no vaccine for extreme weather. This year, horrific numbers from extreme wild weather goes to illustrate that,” he said. “For Canada, it was another destructive, expensive and impactful year.”

There were around 100 news-making weather stories throughout the year. At a presentation announcing the list of top 10 weather events, Winnipeg came up often as an example of a city that broke weather records.

“In the midst of what was a really remarkable mild weather… Winnipeg had its mildest beginning to winter on record,” Phillips said. “And then, in early February to Valentine’s Day, came this arctic blast, almost kind of polar vortex-like.”

While Canada continued to worry about four waves of COVID-19, it also rode out four heatwaves from coast to coast. It was the fifth-warmest summer in 75 years on record, and the number of especially hot days over 30 C grew exponentially across the country.

“Winnipeg had 35 of those suckers,” Phillips said. “They normally get 13, well, they had a huge number, and the most ever with records that go back to the 1880s.”

Another record broken in Winnipeg was the amount of time the city sat under smoky conditions — 239 hours of smoke and haze, the most in 140 years of records at Environment Canada. The city also posted the driest back-to-back years in recorded history.

“Clearly for Manitoba, for First Nations communities, it’s almost become a rite of summer to be airlifted to the Ottawa Valley, or Regina, or Thunder Bay to escape the fumigating kind of smoke,” Phillips said.

Topping the list at No. 1 was the record high-pressure heat dome that sat over British Columbia and Alberta at the end of June, logging an all-time new temperature record in Canada: almost 50 C.

Phillips said it was “hard to find the words to describe” the impact of the heat wave, which broke thousands of daily site records, including 100 recorded temperatures between 40 and 50 C, left millions to swelter under dangerous heat, and resulted in a death toll of 600 in B.C. and nearly 200 in Alberta.

This kind of extreme weather is set to only get worse under the threat of worsening climate change, Phillips said.

“There were 6,500 farm animals, and countless birds, over a billion marine organisms get cooked in the hot waters of the Pacific,” he said.

“In the end, scientists concluded, unequivocally, that this blistering heat would’ve been virtually impossible without climate warming.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca