The London, Ont., region hit record-breaking warmth with gusting winds causing a special weather statement on Wednesday.
As of 4 p.m., the Forest City is sitting at 14 C with the mid-week forecast predicting a new Feb. 15 high of 15 C, surpassing the city’s previous high temperature at 11.7 C set in 1954.
The normal high for this time of the year is -1 C.
An Environment Canada special weather statement said southwesterly winds could blow up to 80 km/h throughout the day. The statement added “high winds may toss loose objects or cause tree branches to break.”
The London Fire Department tweeted out around 1:30 p.m. that a large tree had fallen onto a bus shelter at Ridout Street & Tecumseh Avenue from the wind. No injuries were reported.
With more mild Canadian winters every year, Robert McLeman, professor of geography and environmental studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, said that things are rapidly changing, “not just in southern Ontario, but the whole Great Lakes region.”
“There’s a lot of good data to show that over the last 50 years, winters have just become shorter, milder, less snowy, and this is part of a longer trend that’s happening,” he said.
He added that “this is the worst winter on record for outdoor rinks, especially in eastern North America.”
McLeman is also a member of Laurier’s RinkWatch – “a citizen science research initiative that asks people who love outdoor skating to help environmental scientists monitor winter weather conditions and study the long-term impacts of climate change.”
According to their website, the initiative was launched back in January 2013 by the university and participants from across North America have submitted information concerning skating conditions on more than 1,400 outdoor rinks and ponds.
McLeman said that the ideal conditions for outdoor rinks start with around three or four nights of frigid temperatures reaching down to –10 C with a general daily standard around –5 C.
“We’ve been tracking for a decade now the relationship between temperatures and scalability of rinks and what we can do is use that data to then forecast into the future.,” he said. “What we see is that 20 or 30 years from now, southwestern Ontario is still going to have winter conditions, but much milder and it will be more difficult to get those long stretches of cold weather.”
McLeman said he “remembers what winters were like back in the 70s and 80s, and you can’t argue against the fact what we see out our windows today is what winter is becoming.
“It’s changing, and unfortunately, if we don’t change our ways in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, we won’t be able to go back to those snowy winter days,” he said.
As of Tuesday, the mean temperature for the month of February, according to Environment Canada, was -1.8 C. The warmest day, prior to Wednesday, was Feb. 9 at 9.9 C, and the coldest being Feb. 3 with a low of -16.9 C.
— With files from Global News’ Matthew Trevithick.
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