While Canadians look at European heat wave in awe, we face our own climate challenges
CBC
Records are breaking across Europe, and Canadians may think they've gotten off lucky this summer, particularly in light of the record-breaking heat wave in British Columbia last June.
But while we've had fewer heat waves this year compared to recent summers, it may just be a case of a late start.
Much of southern Ontario is under a heat warning as of Tuesday, from Windsor through to Ottawa, as is a large swath of Saskatchewan. In southern B.C., temperatures are forecast to be 32 C for much of the week in places like Kamloops and Kelowna, falling just short of the heat warning criteria set out by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC).
"We had our turn last year," said ECCC's senior climatologist, David Phillips. "This is what we call the dog days of summer; it's the halfway point. Typically a month after the longest day, you can get the warmest day. Not every year, because it depends on the air mass that you're under, but typically, this is when the residual heat in the land is given up in the lakes and the rivers."
And, though we had a slow start, there's still a lot of summer to come.
"We really had a kind of a cool, wet spring in most parts of Canada," Phillips said. "And so we've heard about heat waves in the United States and India, and Pakistan and China and Europe. And we're wondering, you know, where are we? Where do we fit in this?"
Because the heat isn't just in Europe right now.
As of Tuesday, 100 million Americans were under a heat warning or heat advisory, from Texas to parts of New York.
That's not to say temperatures haven't soared in spring or summer in Canada so far — they've just been "one-day wonders," Phillips said. But that's going to change for Eastern Canada.
"Our models are suggesting that the second half of summer is going to be warmer than the first half in Eastern Canada," he said. "We see this week as, really, the first sort of example of that."
While every year is different, climate change is altering weather patterns across the globe — as we've seen this year — from more frequent droughts to floods to heat waves. And Canada won't be spared.
"The warming we have experienced is about twice the warming that the global average has experienced," said Greg Flato, a research scientist with ECCC who is also the vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Working Group I.
Flato said we should expect to see even drier conditions in the Prairies, an area that already experiences dry summers.
"And as the climate warms, they tend to get drier," he said. "That's just kind of a general rule of thumb everywhere: that the dry areas get drier, wet areas get wetter as the climate changes. So we expect to see in general an increase in average precipitation across Canada, particularly in northern Canada."
