Sunday, March 14, 2010

The warmest, driest winter on record in Canada

According to Environment Canada, the winter of 2009/10 was the warmest and the driest since national records were kept in 1948. The country was 4.0 C warmer and 22% drier than "normal", which for those of you scoring at home, is the 1971-2000 1951-1980 mean.


6 comments:

Anonymous said...

What's the attitude in Canada to this? I would have expected it to be front page news, but I haven't seen a mention of it in the few papers I've skimmed.

Simon Donner said...

Good question. If anyone spots mainstream news coverage, please let us know.

Anonymous said...

Judging from the map 95% of Canadians experienced near normal winter tempertures.

LEM

Simon Donner said...

That depends on your definition of near normal: Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal were all ~1.5-3 C above the norm.

Anonymous said...

At the risk of picking a nit, for the Climate Trends and Variations Bulletins (CTVB), Environment Canada defines the normal baseline using the 1951-80 thirty year interval.

The Canadian MSM was too focused on the global warming is a hoax story to notice that temperatures in Canada were running well above normal. It fits in well with our current federal governments spin. At some point in the near future I expect the CTVB to dissappear to save the government from continued embarrassment.

Simon Donner said...

Thanks for catching that - I was thinking of their "climate normals"