The kids may be heading back to school this week, but summer is far from over.
Environment Canada issued yet another heat warning on Monday for the Montreal area including Laval, Longueuil, Varennes, Châteauguay and La Prairie.
The weather agency warns hot and humid conditions settling over southern Quebec are expected to stick around until Wednesday.
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On Tuesday, humidex values are expected to be in the low 40s.
It is the fourth time a heat warning has been issued for the city so far this summer. Environment Canada says it issues heat warnings when “very high temperature or humidity conditions are expected to pose an elevated risk of heat illnesses, such as heat stroke or heat exhaustion.”
Alexandre Parent, a meteorologist at Environment Canada, admits it has been an unusually hot summer.
“Usually in Montreal we have about nine days where temperatures rise above 30 degrees Celsius and with tomorrow it will be the 18th day. So, we’ve doubled that,” he said, adding that in 2017 there were only six days where temperatures soared above 30.
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Parent also cautioned that warmer summers are a sign of things to come.
“When we look at climatology and studies that are being done with the global warming, we see that warm records are broken twice as often as cold records and that was not the case in the 1970s or the 1980s where it was closer to one- to-one,” he explained.
“So you would get a cold warning and then a hot one but now we are going into ratios where it’s approximately two-to-one.”
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And while global warming is sometimes a hard sell during cold Quebec winters, Parent said we are seeing a warming trend.
“When we have cold snaps they are not as cold as they used to get so everybody remembers last Christmas it was pretty cold but we didn’t break any records,” he said.
“But when we have heat waves now they tend to have a longer duration and they are warmer as well. So there’s a trend line with the global warming that we can see there.”
To avoid heat-related illnesses, health authorities are reminding residents to stay hydrated and reduce their exposure to heat. Outdoor activities should be held during cooler periods in the day.
— With files from Global’s Cora Macdonald
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