Brandon Sun - PRINT EDITION
The past 12 months have been the hottest on record since temperature logs began in the region 122 years ago.
From Aug. 1, 2011 to July 31, 2012, the average temperature was 5.2 C, while the normal temperature is only 2 C over a 12-month period.
The previous record was set in 2005-06 with the average temperature of 4.6 C.
David Phillips, senior climatologist for Environment Canada, said it was a truly remarkable year.
“You beat the record by more than half a degree, which in my business is like a sea change. If we break records by a tenth of a degree, it’s huge. We usually calculate things by the hundredths. Nothing was even close to what we saw this year,” Phillips said.
“If you’re building a case that climate change has begun to bite deep and hard, this year is another piece of circumstantial evidence — which just keeps mounting. The amount of evidence is overwhelming and we are getting to a point where we just can’t turn a blind eye to it.”
The weather changes in the region may be permanent, said Danny Blair, associate dean of science and director of the Climate Studies Institute at the University of Winnipeg.
“It’s becoming very hard to not conclude that global warming is decidedly here, especially with the extreme events and the record runs like the one we’ve just experienced,” Blair said.
“The averages are changing. We’re still going to get some cold weather. We’re always going to have ups and downs forever. But the probability of having really warm weather is much greater than it has been in the past.”
Phillips said the most drastic change is occurring in the winter months. The Prairies experience temperatures 4 C warmer in winter than they were 60 years ago, while the planet is only 0.8 C warmer now than it was 100 years ago.
Blair agreed the winter patterns we’ve experienced lately aren’t the same as the patterns our parents and grandparents grew up with on the Prairies.
“We are relatively quickly losing the kind of winters that we’re famous for. Winter is the season that has changed the most,” Blair said.
Last January averaged nearly 7 C above normal temperatures and March was nearly 8 C above normal.
However, summers are also heating up. Phillips said last July was the fifth or sixth warmest month ever recorded with 11 days above 30 C, while there are normally around 7 days hotter than 30 C.
The agriculture industry is particularily sensitive to changing weather patterns. Lionel Kaskiw, farm production advisor for Manitoba Agriculture, said the heat has negatively effected oilseed, grains and forage crops yields this summer.
“Hot weather tends to dry things out and when the crops dry out too early you just don’t get the normal production,” Kaskiw said.
Phillips said the changing weather patterns can be difficult for farmers to deal with because they can’t necessarily practise farming as they did 25 years ago.
Kaskiw said farmers have noticed summers seem to be getting longer and they are beginning to change what they plant.
“We’re starting to see more grain corn and soy beans planted in southwestern Manitoba. But the scary thing is that we can’t count on it (the longer summers). I think most people believe things are changing, we just don’t know how drastic or how fast they are changing,” Kaskiw said.
Philips said the accuracy of day-to-day forecasting has remained the same, but predicting weather patterns from season to season has recently become more difficult.
Climatologists usually base long-range predictions on decades worth of data, but Philips said the climate has changed so much that he sometimes finds it better to base predictions on just the past five years — a longer timeframe can mask some of the current issues and hide the real variability effecting climate.
“Last winter, we didn’t get it right on the Prairies. It was a La Nina year and we thought it was going to be colder than normal, but then we discovered the importance of the Arctic oscillation in controlling our weather,” Phillips said.
“The weather had been like wild swings of the pendulum from one side to the other. When you average everything out you get normal, but we don’t experience (the weather) in a normal way. We are having issues with too wet or too dry, or too cold or too hot. Balance is important in the weather, but we aren’t seeing that. The new normal is to expect the unexpected.”
Environment Canada’s models predict August will also be warmer than normal.
» rbooker@brandonsun.com,
with files from the Winnipeg Free Press
Republished from the Brandon Sun print edition August 11, 2012
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The past 12 months have been the hottest on record since temperature logs began in the region 122 years ago.
From Aug. 1, 2011 to July 31, 2012, the average temperature was 5.2 C, while the normal temperature is only 2 C over a 12-month period.
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The past 12 months have been the hottest on record since temperature logs began in the region 122 years ago.
From Aug. 1, 2011 to July 31, 2012, the average temperature was 5.2 C, while the normal temperature is only 2 C over a 12-month period.
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