Environment Canada’s top 10 weather stories of 2020
Environment Canada – In a year where headlines were dominated by the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, Canada also saw its share of memorable weather events. Environment Canada released a list of some of the most noteworthy to end the year.
From a list of 100 significant weather happenings across Canada in 2020, events were ranked from one to ten based on factors that included the degree to which Canada and Canadians were impacted, the extent of the area affected, economic and environmental effects and the event’s longevity as a top news story.
For more details on each story, visit the Environment Canada website.
1. August long-weekend storms: East and West
The long weekend in August featured some nasty summer weather in both southern Alberta/Saskatchewan and in Ontario, with hail damage a feature.
- Fall in Canada – winter in the West and summer in the East
Across much of the Prairies residents welcomed unseasonably warm weather during the first week of November, but with an eye on a powerful storm lining up to the West. From November 7 to 9, the summery interlude came to a dramatic end with the arrival of a slow-moving, moisture-laden Colorado low from the American northwest. Strong winds with gusts up to 85 km/h ushered in the storm and combined with falling temperatures to produce wind chill values of minus 22 Celsius.
In contrast, at the end of October and in early November, southern parts of Ontario and Quebec had a taste of winter with the season’s first snowfall and biting frosts.
- Frigid spring helps Canadians self-isolate
It is often said that spring is reluctant to arrive in Canada. In 2020, spring was not late; it went missing. Following a mild winter, the weather turned cold across most of southern Canada in March and persisted for another two months.
- The year’s most powerful tornado
In a year with at least 77 tornadoes across Canada, the highest rated and therefore the most powerful tornado occurred on August 7 in southwestern Manitoba near the Rural Municipalities of Pipestone and Sifton.
- Record hurricane season and Canada wasn’t spared
Meteorologists predicted another “active” Atlantic hurricane season in 2020, but a record season was more like it! The tally at the official end of the season was 30 named storms, 13 hurricanes of which six became major hurricanes– approaching three years’ worth of storms in one.
- St. John’s “snowmageddon”
Meteorologists called it a bomb cyclone, where a storm’s atmosphere dropped 24 hPa (degrees of pressure) in 24 hours. For townies in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador the storm that hit in mid January was “Snowmageddon” – the fiercest blizzard of a lifetime in a city known for its punishing winter storms.
- Endless hot summer in the East
Following a cold spring with frost and snow in the first half of May, the weather in Central and Eastern Canada soon turned from slush to sweat.
- Fort McMurray’s flood of a century
For the second time in four years, residents of Fort McMurray, Alberta were forced out of their homes. This time it was water, not fire. Severe ice jamming on a 25-kilometre stretch of the Athabasca River caused water to back up on the adjacent Clearwater River, flooding much of downtown at the end of April.
- BC’s September skies: all smoke, no fires
Statistics from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre reported a second consecutive quiet fire season across British Columbia in 2020 following two of the busiest years ever in 2017 and 2018. The number of fires province-wide this year was down to 629 or a third of the fires in the record year of 2018.
- Calgary’s billion-dollar hailer
Calgary endured more than its share of stormy summer weather in 2020. The season featured frequent hailfalls with grapefruit-size stones, powerful wind speeds, tornado scares, dark funnel clouds, lightning-filled skies, torrential rains, and flash flooding. The city lived up to its reputation as the hailstorm capital of Canada. The Insurance Bureau of Canada sees hail as such a threat in the city that it sponsors a cloud-seeding program in order to diminish the size of urban hailstones – a pea-size stone does much less damage than ones the size of tennis balls. The June 13 hailstorm was Canada’s costliest and the fourth most expensive insured natural disaster in history with Canadian insurers estimating the dollar value of the 63,000 claims (minus crop losses) at about $1.3 billion. More than 32,000 vehicles were extensively damaged with cracked and smashed windshields with vehicle write-offs totalling $386 million.
