Ottawa’s summer to feature average temps, with flashes of lightning: Accuweather
The summer of 2012 might be a lot louder than usual. Accuweather is predicting more thunderstorms than usual this year, like this one photographed by Citizen reader Steve Slaby in July 2010.
OTTAWA — It’s not the heat, it’s the thunder and lightning.
Accuweather says Ottawa will have average temperatures this summer, but extra thunderstorms, the result of colder-than-usual air high in the atmosphere.
Last year’s summer, which included 200-plus millimetres of rain flooding through the Outaouais on St-Jean-Baptiste Day and washing out highways, may just have been a warm-up.
Then again, maybe not. Environment Canada is making no predictions of extra-violent weather.
The two forecasting groups disagree on pretty much everything, though Environment Canada won’t have its official summer forecast until June 1. (It also carries continuous forecasts looking three months ahead on its website all year long.)
The details:
• Accuweather says the area from Sudbury to the Rockies will be warm this summer, but southern and eastern Ontario and Quebec, and the West Coast, will be see average temperatures. Atlantic Canada is expected to be hot.
“Active, stormy weather will occur across eastern Ontario and southern Quebec, keeping long heat spells at bay,” the company says. “Cities that lie in the path of more stormy weather this summer include Ottawa ... and Montreal and Quebec City ...
“There will be cooler air aloft this summer, making the atmosphere more unstable and conducive for thunderstorm development,” said Accuweather’s senior meteorologist, Brett Anderson.
• At Environment Canada, David Phillips insists there’s no reliable way to predict the number of thunderstorms, and his department doesn’t try.
“That one (the prediction of more thunderstorms) is a little mysterious to me,” he said.
His current summer model “is showing warmer across pretty much all of Ontario. Warmer and drier.” That covers June, July and August.
“In the Ottawa area, I would say it looks like below-normal to near-normal precipitation,” though rainfall is one of the most difficult predictions to make.
“It says nothing about severe weather. I saw the Accuweather (forecast). I’m a little surprised that they would even talk about ... what this means from a thunderstorm point of view.”
It’s possible that cool air at high altitude can make weather unstable, he said. But storms don’t follow easy patterns.
in 2009, the summer was cooler than normal and yet Ontario had a record number of tornadoes — 32 in the summer, including 18 on one day. An average figure for the summer is about 12.
The main theme for eastern Ontario is the continuing warm spell. We haven’t had a month below average temperatures since 2010.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
No comments:
Post a Comment