Manitoba had a less-stormy summer

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This article was published 03/09/2019 (2278 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Storm chasers had to find new hobbies.

That was the kind of summer Manitoba experienced this year.

As usual, weather patterns were spotty across the province between June and August, but overall, preliminary numbers from Environment Canada suggest this summer was one with few severe storms.

“It’s been pretty disappointing,” said Shannon Bileski, an extreme weather enthusiast based near Selkirk. “We’ve had pockets of rainfall, but that’s about it.”

The avid storm chaser of more than a decade said she only had the opportunity to follow a third of the storms she normally follows each year by this time. It was nowhere near as exciting a summer as 2007, when Bileski chased Canada’s first E-5 tornado — the most powerful on the Fujita intensity scale — in Elie. Last summer, she witnessed the deadly storm in Alonsa.

“It seems like Alberta and Saskatchewan hogged the severe thunderstorms for the summer,” said Sara Hoffman, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Four tornadoes touched down in Manitoba this year — half the total recorded last year. To the west, Alberta recorded a banner year for the storms with at least 22.

“As much as we want to see Mother Nature’s beauty and fury, we don’t want to see anybody’s properties or animals or crops harmed. From an agriculture and insurance perspective, it’s been a good year,” Bileski added.

Forest ecologist Andrew Park also noted fewer storms have resulted in fewer forest fires this summer.

“It was interesting because it wasn’t interesting,” Park said about Manitoba’s fire season. Despite dry conditions early on, there weren’t as many lightning strikes — what Park calls fuel, likening the summer environment to “a campfire without a lighter.”

The province had recorded 277 fires at the end of August, down from the 20-year-average of nearly 440 fires to that date. The number of hectares burned so far is 101,453, and while there are four months remaining on the calendar year, that is less than half of the totals from the past two years.

Still, upwards of 150 residents had to evacuate their homes in fly-in communities due to dangerously dense smoke from fires that broke out in northern Manitoba in July.

“I don’t know if you can say there’s a typical fire year,” said Park, a professor of biology at the University of Winnipeg who keeps tabs on fire counts across the country.

He said the standard deviation from year-to-year totals is almost 250 fires in Manitoba. However, there is a clear trend of fires becoming more frequent across Canada, Park added.

Terri Lang, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, called this summer “pretty darn average,” aside from the jetstream making a detour around Manitoba — the reason for fewer storms.

In Winnipeg, the average temperatures for June, July and August (up until Aug. 29, with the weather agency’s latest data available to reporters on Sept. 1) were 17.2 C, 20.2 C and 18.5 C, respectively.

June and July temperatures were up slightly from 30-year historical averages of 17 C and 19.7 C. August was down from an average of 18.8 C. There were three days above 30 C in June, two in July and four in August.

Chuck Fossay, president of the Manitoba Canola Growers Association, said dry conditions in spring and early summer left many farmers struggling with pests, especially flea beetles.

In Winnipeg, May was both dry and colder than normal. June — usually the wettest month of the summer — clocked in as the seventh-driest June in 148 years on record with only 25 mm compared to the 90 mm average.

“There’s been a lot of variability from field to field and farm to farm, depending on the variety (farmers) are growing and how much rainfall they’ve received,” Fossay said about crop yields.

Despite a dry June, Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Lang said July and August numbers brought the total precipitation closer to normal.

With the rain came mosquitoes, following two consecutive years of low trap counts. City of Winnipeg data show the citywide average peaked at 108 at the end of July. In comparison, the highest citywide trap count average recorded in 2018 was 20.

This year’s data is a stark contrast to last year — Winnipeg’s hottest summer in 30 years. “No summer seems to be like the next,” Lang said. “This time last year, it was baking hot and there was a bunch of smoke, but what a difference a year makes.”

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @macintoshmaggie