Trick or treat? Canada's wicked, record-setting Halloween weather
Do you want to know what Canada's hottest, wettest, snowiest and coldest Halloweens on record are? Well, we have the answers for you on those and other spooky statistics for Oct. 31
When people look at notable, and often ghoulish, weather records set on Halloween in Canada, they will see a pattern start to take shape.
Ontario has the treats (warmest Halloween), while B.C., Alberta and Northern Canada have the tricks (windiest, wettest, snowiest and coldest Halloweens, respectively).
SEE ALSO: How severe weather has impacted Halloween over the years
In Canada, Halloween usually means balancing a fun and functional costume, keeping weather in mind, made evident by the records that have been set. The outfit can be aesthetically pleasing, or ghoulish, to the eye, but it must keep you protected through inclement weather.
Without further adieu, here are some of the Canadian records that stand out the most from Halloween's past.
Warmest Canadian temperature: A balmy 26.1 C in Welland, Ont., in 1876.
Warmest recent Canadian temperature: A mild 24 C in Windsor, Ont., in 2003.
Coldest Canadian Halloween temperature: A dangerously frigid reading of -41.1 C in Eureka, Nvt., in 1983.
Recent coldest Canadian temperature: A bitterly cold temperature of -32.2 C in Eureka, Nvt., in 2020. Honourable shoutout to Timmins, Ont., with a frigid temperature of -12.1 C in 2020.
Windiest Halloween: A whopping 154 km/h gust in Pincher Creek, B.C, in 1967.
Wettest Halloween: 111 mm of soaking rains in Tofino, B.C., in 1903.
Snowiest Halloween: A substantial 37.6 centimetres that fell in Banff, Alta., in 1990.
A noteworthy mention belongs to Cartwright, N.L., which received a healthy 33.8 centimetres of snow in that same year (1990).
Interesting factoid about Welland, Ont. Although it has the warmest temperature recorded on Halloween, it also has one of the more significant snowfalls in Canada: A notable 20.3 cm that fell on Oct. 31, 1873.
Most bizarre Halloween snowfall
Those aren't the only oddities for Halloween. How about the rarest snowfall event on Oct. 31?
It began snowing into the evening of Oct. 31, 1984, up and down the South Coast of B.C. including at sea level. By the morning of Nov. 1, more than 20 cm of snowfall had fallen in the Comox Valley and 30 cm in the Campbell River area. Even Greater Victoria received a few centimetres of snowfall.
Other weather tidbits from past Halloweens
While Nov. 21, 2007 saw the Great Toronto Area's (GTA) high only reach 9 C., just a few weeks earlier, on Oct. 31, trick-or-treaters were delighted with temperatures as high as 18 C.
If you wanted to know the record for the hottest GTA Halloween, that tally is a mild 22.8 C, set in 1971. The normal daytime for that time of year is 10 C.
Montreal had a very wet Halloween in 2019, with forecasts putting projected totals as high as 50+ mm. The city and surrounding regions were also faced with blustery wind gusts that reached up to 90 km/h. In fact, the conditions were rough enough to postpone the day's planned activities, moving them to Friday, Nov. 1.
WATCH: 'Spookiest' weather encounters caught on camera across Canada
With files from Tyler Hamilton, a meteorologist at The Weather Network.
Thumbnail courtesy of Getty Images/Onfokus/Creative #: 1425372478.
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