TORONTO – Have the past couple of months felt cooler than normal? You might be surprised to find that it’s actually been slightly warmer than average.
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Don’t believe it? Well, May’s average temperature is normally 13.1 C. But this past May, the average temperature was 14.1 C. The daytime normal high in Toronto is 18.8 C, this year the city had an average of 19.3 C.
June was similar: While the average temperature is 18.6 C in Toronto, last month came in at 19.8 C with an average daytime temperature of 25.1, slightly higher than the normal of 24.2.
That’s two consecutive months above average.
David Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment Canada said that he’s mystified by people who are complaining that this summer feels cooler than normal.
“Maybe people thought that – given the winter we had and the very disappointing spring – Mother Nature would give us a scorcher,” he said. But Mother Nature just doesn’t work that way.
Maybe, as Canadians, we just can’t help complain about the weather no matter what it’s doing. It’s either too hot, too cold, too snowy or too rainy.
“I think it just comes down to the fact that the comfort zone is bitching about the weather,” Phillips said. “And now [people are] bitching about the fact that it’s not hot enough. But those same people will be complaining if we had a string of three or four days in a row where the temperature was above 30.”
The fact that we haven’t yet reached a day with temperatures above 30 C in Toronto may give us the impression that it’s been cooler. And there haven’t been any heat alert days or cooling centres open.
And though May and June have been just above average, July has been on the cooler side. The city usually sees a daily maximum of 27.1 C. But this month only 12 days topped that.
So far this month, the average temperature has been 20.4 C, below the average of 21.5 C. As the next few days are expected to be below normal, it’s unlikely that we’ll rise above the monthly average.
Though we haven’t seen any days this month with temperatures above 30 C – which may seem unusual – it does happen from time to time.
On average we see about six days in July where the temperature reaches above 30 C. The last time we had a July without any days above 30 C was in 2009. It also happened in 2000 and 1996.
Phillips believes that we should be thanking our lucky stars for the moderate weather. Last year around this time we were coming off four hot and steamy days where the temperature ranged from 32 to almost 35 C.
“We’ve had no haze days at all in the province, and what could be better than that?” Phillips said. “You’re not going to get me complaining about it.”
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