A very wet canola field in St. Andrews, Man. this past July.

A warm and relatively wet 2016

November was the hottest month compared to average, breaking some records in Manitoba

I know the year isn’t quite done yet, but I really want to take a look back and see just how the numbers turned out for our weather across the Prairies this year. I figure the best way to do this is to look back month by month, then do an overall summary of the

December’s weather outlook? Cold

December’s weather outlook? Cold

A good portion of the record-level heating we saw in November took place during the night

Well, it’s now official. November 2016 has gone down in the record books as the warmest month on record across much of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. In the last issue I pointed out we should easily beat the record, and we did exactly that. In fact, we didn’t just break the record for the warmest November



Ice melts on the Aletsch Glacier in Fiesch, Switzerland, August 12, 2015. One of Europe’s biggest glaciers, the Great Aletsch coils 23 km (14 miles) through the Swiss Alps — and yet this mighty river of ice could almost vanish in the lifetimes of people born today because of climate change.

Climate change could cross key threshold in a decade — scientists

Exceeding global warming targets could mean drastic action is necessary

The planet could pass a key target on world temperature rise in about a decade, prompting accelerating loss of glaciers, steep declines in water availability, worsening land conflicts and deepening poverty, scientists said last week. Last December, 195 nations agreed to try to hold world temperature rise to “well below” 2 C, with an aim of


A detailed look at this year’s frost-free season

Winnipeg has shown the longest frost-free season of all the major Prairie stations

I received a few emails asking me to look into frost and the length of the frost-free season in more depth, so that is what we are going to start off with. Years and years ago, back when I was working on my thesis in geography at the University of Winnipeg, I did some research

A map included in the new online climate atlas of the Prairie Climate Centre depicts the average number of +30 C days between 2051 to 2080 if a high carbon future unfolds under a ‘business-as-usual’ carbon emissions scenario.

Zooming in on climate change impacts

A new atlas outlines climate change scenarios from a local perspective

Municipal officials and planners can now catch a glimpse of the future for their jurisdictions under different climate change scenarios. A new climate altas released by the Prairie Climate Centre (PCC) outlines how living and growing conditions in Western Canada might be affected, including a worse-case scenario showing desert-like summer heat enduring for weeks by


Drought scout flags areas on Prairies

The western half of the region is at risk for low soil moisture

Parts of the Prairies could see limited soil moisture this growing season, as low precipitation and warm temperatures have compounded, a government specialist says. “We went into the fall in a fairly good position, but over the first part of the winter we received very low snowfall,” said Trevor Hadwen, agroclimate specialist with Agriculture and

Due to a production error, the temperature table posted here on April 4 contained a line incorrectly identifying temperatures after 1930-39 as 15-year averages. The correct table appears here.

A look back at historical Brandon temperatures

WMO statements on global warming aren’t borne out by local data

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a United Nations agency, says that 2015 is the hottest year on record and that 15 of the 16 hottest years on record have been this century. What an alarming statement. Yet it is contrary to personal experience growing up and living most of my life in southwestern Manitoba. So


Global and regional temperature anomalies

Globally, 2015 was the warmest year, 
at 0.9 C above the 20th-century average

In my previous article, I finished by saying I would hopefully be able to continue our look back at 2015 by exploring some of the top weather stories from our part of the world. Between then and now, both NOAA and NASA released their 2015 global temperature data and I figured we should spend some

weather map of CHUs

Agro-climate data is a ‘mismatch’ with overall trends

Farmers need improved data on agro-climate to make sense of climate change, says U of M soil scientist

Numbers don’t lie but they’re presently a real puzzle when it comes to making sense of climate change and what’s happening on the farm, says a University of Manitoba professor. Despite warming trends of recent years and forecasts of a continued increase, analysis of agro-climate data shows the last spring frosts are only marginally earlier,