EDMONTON — We’re not in “heat wave” territory, but the Capital Region is sure experiencing a warm bout of late autumn weather.
For the past five days, Edmonton has been at least 3°C above the seasonal average temperature, and the mild conditions are forecast to continue.
“With the ‘rex block’ pattern in the jet stream, conditions have stayed consistent the past few days,” said Jesse Beyer, Global Edmonton’s chief meteorologist. That set up has ensured that warm and dry conditions will prevail.
Assuming the warm forecast holds true, temperatures for the first week of December in Edmonton will be 6°C to 8°C above the seasonal average.
December 1999 and December 2011 had the next most similar bouts of above seasonal conditions to start off the festive month. Unlike 2015’s forecast, they did see some double digit days, however, the temperatures were not as consistently warm as the forecast is for this year.
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This means that December 2015 could very well see the most consistent streak of temperatures that are well above seasonal in at least 20 years.
“With forecast highs above 0°C for the next week, this could be the warmest first week of December in almost 30 years. Last time Edmonton saw the first seven days of December with highs above 0°C was in 1987,” said Beyer.
This comes as no surprise to weather watchers.
November statistics from Environment Canada show that Edmonton was about 3°C warmer than average in 2015. The 30-year average for daytime highs in November is 0°C. In 2015, the average day time high was 2.7°C.
“We’ve talked about it all year,” Beyer continued, referring to the “super” El Ninõ weather patterns of late.
“It has been providing, and will likely continue to promote above seasonal temperatures, and below average precipitation numbers this year.”
The precipitation numbers from the past month were indeed below seasonal, but just slightly. The 30-year average precipitation for November in Edmonton is 18.0 mm, and this year we saw 16.9 mm.
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