Did your Canadian city make the list of 'worst' springs?
Whichever way you define the worst spring, both Canadian coasts struggled for seasonality, with profound precipitation swings and misses sandwiched in between.
“Worst” is always subjective.
Some Canadians relish cloudy and dreary weather, but many sun-starved Canadians are eagerly waiting for the changing seasons. Whichever way you define the worst spring, both Canadian coasts struggled for seasonality, with profound precipitation swings and misses sandwiched in between.
If, for a moment, below-normal temperatures are a “weather-worst," let's start with the city that counted the coldest (relative to normal) days this April...Vancouver, B.C.
DON'T MISS: Seeking the warmth, Toronto? Head north...the Far North
B.C.
If seven consecutive months of snowfall wasn't a sign in Vancouver, the temperatures in April certainly were.
It’s a bad sign if you have to go back a month to find the warmest temperature of the year, but that’s what you would have to do. The temperature of 16.7°C on March 28 is the warmest to date because April failed to deliver spring seasonality. From April 1-25, or 80 per cent of the month, Vancouver has been cooler than normal besides a mere one day.
There is a silver lining here that our next region will fall short of, and that is change. B.C. recorded its first 20-degree day of the year on Monday, April 24 in Ashcroft, and a building ridge of high pressure may bring Vancouver a couple of them to close out the month.
Newfoundland
It could always be worse, unless you live in St. John’s, N.L. The folks on the rock can take some pride in their spring being notoriously slow to blossom, but even this year has been excessively sluggish.
If you thought going back a month was bad enough, St. John’s has to go back months to dig up the warmest temperature of the year -- 13.9°C on the 15th of January. The troughing has been so persistent that it shows up as a feature when you create a composite of the atmosphere.
The cloud cover data is equally abysmal, as you have to go back to early March to find something resembling partly cloudy conditions.
Unfortunately, there is no significant pattern change over the next week or two for St. John’s, with continued below-seasonal temperatures forecast.
The in-between
The rest of Canada featured prolific swings in temperature and snowfall, but every region here has recorded at least a brief taste of spring or even summer-like warmth.
Calgary is probably wondering where all the April snow went, but you don’t have to look too far. Saskatchewan and Manitoba were impacted by a significant winter storm. It’s worth a mention that the chilliest temperature anomalies lie across southern Saskatchewan over the past 60 days: As much as four or five degrees below seasonal.
Ontario and Quebec, your season to date has tipped warm, in part by a historically warm April heat event in the middle of the month.
The back-and-forth swings across the Maritime provinces blended into a near-normal temperature profile through March and April, but the storm track has evaporated as of late.
