Submitted by Bill Caulfeild-Browne
It’s not unusual for November to give us a wide variety of weather. The first eleven days continued where October left off with daily highs in the double digits and still no frost. It wasn’t until the 13th that the mercury dropped below 0C, and then only briefly, to -1.6C.
After that things did deteriorate for a couple of weeks. Lows were consistently below freezing and highs were barely above freezing. Then in the last week warmer temperatures prevailed once again, reaching 8.5C.
The highest the thermometer read was 18.2C on the 5th and the lowest was -5.3C on the 20th. Overall the month was 1.8C above the long-term mean. This is consistent with the trend to warmer winters we have seen in the last 20+ years.
It was a dry month – just 34 mm against the 20th century average of 81 mm. The only truly wet day was the 6th when 12 mm fell. Winds were, as usual, from the south on warm days and from the NNE on cold ones. The average wind speed was 14 kmh. with the strongest gust at 66 kmh – fairly normal for November.
However, on the 20th Tobermory escaped a major brush with high winds and lake effect snow that dumped over 120 cm on Wiarton and closed Highway 6. Nearly half of that fell in just four hours making it the snowiest day ever recorded there. On Big Tub, we got about 3 cm.
Tobermory’s weather was quite representative of Ontario as a whole. Environment and Climate Change Canada described it as “Incredible warmth followed by abrupt shift to winter”. St Catherines reached 26.8C on the 5th, the highest November temperature recorded in Ontario in years. The North set records – Sioux Lookout reached 20.9C, Wawa hit 20.9.
It was quite an exciting month for weather watchers but I’m not sure I want that to continue in December. We’ve already had winds gusting to 80 kms and this only the 4th. “Climate Winter” began on the 1st, as opposed to “Astronomic Winter” which starts at the Winter Solstice on December 21st.
