It might be July, but it hasn’t felt like it throughout much of central and eastern Canada, particularly after a weekend of wild storms. But meteorologists say things could be warming up for August.
For much of the summer, long pants and sweaters have been getting pulled out of drawers a lot more often than shorts and tank tops in Ontario. Meanwhile western Canada has seen an abundance of dry, warm weather this summer.
All that cool weather means that gardeners in Ontario and central Canada have noticed their tomatoes are still green, and crop farmers are beginning to worry whether their corn will ever grow tall enough.
Over the weekend, many parts of Canada got hit by a new spate of wild weather, with at least three tornadoes touching down across Manitoba on Saturday, and torrential thunderstorms hitting parts of Ontario Sunday.
The thunderstorms stretched all the way from Windsor to Kingston, dumping a month's worth of rain in a single evening, including hail the size of quarters in some parts.
Thousands of residents in Grand Bend, Ont. lost power after the town was hit by either a tornado or a "burst of damaging winds," which meteorologists say is a broad path of wind that comes out of the front end of the storm. Environment Canada confirmed on that an EF-1 twister hit Grand Bend on Monday.
The national weather agency says strong winds between 155 and 175 km/hour swept through the area at the time of the tornado. Environment Canada says there was a report of one serious injury near Pinery Provincial Park due to a fallen tree. Storm investigators say the track damage from the tornado was approximately 500 metres wide and five kilometres long.
Environment Canada's senior climatologist David Phillips says what was remarkable about this past weekend's weather was how many Canadians were affected.
"The fact that this wild weather covered so much of the continent is probably the big story," he told CTV News Channel Monday.
Many of these areas are going to experience a cool-off for the rest of the week, says Phillips, because what triggered the weekend's wild weather was the arrival of a cold front that caused "unsettled weather to get more unsettled."
On the back end of that cold front will be a pocket of very warm air that settles over southern B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan this week, continuing a summer-long heat wave in those regions.
But for Canadians getting tired of waiting for the heat of summer to begin, there's good news. Phillips says forecasters are expecting a turnaround in August and September, which should bring warmer-than-normal temperatures to central and eastern Canada.
"We see for the crops, good heat in the Prairies and for people in central Canada and Ontario, good beer-drinking weather," he said.
Phillips added that it seems to him that patterns of wild weather are starting to become the norm. The problem for many Canadian cities though, is that much of our infrastructure was built in the 1950s and 1960s and it's simply not prepared to handle this new climate.
"It might not be a one-off, (but) we think this might very well be the kind of weather we see in the future," he said.
With reports from The Canadian Press
