Students are back in class, the meteorological summer has ended, and the stats are in. Edmonton saw warmer temperatures and had more rain than normal this summer.
June, July and August are historically Edmonton’s warmest and wettest months of the year. This year, the warm and stormy days seemed to never end, but surprisingly there were very few weather extremes.
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The city of Edmonton didn’t see a single day in June, July or August with temperatures of over 30°C. Normally, there would be about one per month. Instead, this year the city saw far more days above 20°C than normal. There were 80 days in the past three months that were 20°C or warmer – an average summer would have only 64 such days.
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While Edmonton saw hotter than normal temperatures, the 2016 temperature variance was a full degree less than it was in 2015. The average daytime high in 2016 was 23.6°, whereas the long-term average is 22.2°.
When it comes to rainfall, total precipitation for June to August 2016 was above average. The Edmonton Blatchford weather station recorded 252.2 millimetres of rain this year, when on average the city sees about 233.2 millimetres.
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And while that doesn’t seem like a huge difference, you’d be correct if you could’ve sworn there were more days with rain than normal this season.
Over the past three months, Edmonton saw 52 days where it rained more than 0.2 millimetres. That’s about 12 more days with rain than the long term average.
All 2016 data used in this article is from Environment Canada’s Edmonton Blatchford weather station. The long term averages are from Environment Canada’s climate normals for the Edmonton City Centre weather station.
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