Submitted by Bill Caulfeild-Browne
I’m beginning to sound like a broken record. After the warmest winter on record, April continued the trend. The mean temperature for the month was 5.4C, or 1.7C more than the 20th century norm. The warmest day was the 9th when the mercury hit 19.7C; the coldest night was the 25th at -3.8C, one of only five nights of frost. Fortunately there seemed to be little damage to the many flowers which had made an early start on Spring.
While the temperature did not set a record for the month, the rainfall certainly did. My station recorded 157 mm., as did the airport. This eclipsed the 2017 record of 131 mm. The wettest period was the 11th/12th where 58 mm. fell – over two inches.
The evening of the 27th treated us to a spectacular lightning storm where the sky was almost continually lit by brilliant flashes. This was followed by 70 km/hr winds and 48 hours of rain, amounting to a further 40 mm.
The Province shared our wet weather. Sudbury got 190 mm. of precipitation, nearly three times as much as usual, and everywhere was wetter than normal except for Kenora. It got only 23 mm., not a good sign for a heavily forested area.
Likewise the temperature – Windsor, London and Welland were as much a 2.5C above normal and nowhere was below normal.
Ice coverage on the Great Lakes was the lowest since records began nearly fifty years ago. Lakes Ontario, Erie and Michigan were all ice-free by the end of March. The remaining cover in some bays of Lake Superior and the North Channel amounted to just 0.4%.
Welcome to climate change. Most of the international data indicate it’s coming farther and faster than predicted. Our weather records confirm it.
