Submitted by Bill Caulfeild-Browne
It feels almost unnatural to be writing about a cool month when, for the last year or two, the headline has often been about above-average temperatures. But May was nearly one degree Celsius below normal, not just in Tobermory but for the Province as a whole. I think most people felt that spring was very slow in coming and the record backs them up.
The month started out cold with daily highs in single digits and frost on the 3rd and 12th. By the middle, things began to warm up and our highest temperature of 23.7C was recorded on the 18th. The third week went cool again with overnight temperatures as low as 3C. It wasn’t until the 26th that things began to recover with a high of 22.8C.
Precipitation was about 10mm below the norm of 65mm, with half of it coming on the 17/18th. Then we were almost dry for the rest of the month.
Sunshine was copious, a by-product of the cold northern high pressure ridge that kept the mercury down. Twenty days were sunny from dawn til dusk, and only two were truly cloudy.
Once again we benefitted from the cold lake and its stabilizing effect on our climate as we avoided the violent thunderstorms that plagued areas to our east and south. While we were having our warmest day, the Ottawa Valley was getting hammered with very high winds, downed tress and closed roads. The next day brought a tornado to the London area and a huge swath of power outages. On May 23rd, when we got just 3mm of rain, the GTA experienced flooding bad enough to cancel the Bruno Mars concert and flood areas of highways 401 and 410.
Environment and Climate Change Canada, to whom I’m indebted for non- Tobermory statistics, suggests that warmer-than-normal conditions might prevail in June. Let’s hope they’re right – it was a long winter!
