2016/05/24

2016 May Long Weekend Post-Mortem

I hadn't really planned on doing yet another post about the Victoria Day long weekend, but this year ended up being so cool and rainy that a recap is worthwhile.


In terms of temperatures we didn't have any days that dropped below freezing like we did in 2015.

But we did have three days where the highs didn't reach 10°C, and Monday just barely broke through at 11°C. Looking at the average daytime highs for all four days, that means that this was the coldest May long weekend of the last 22 years. Taking both the highs and lows into consideration 2010 was still a little bit cooler than 2016, although not by much.

In terms of precipitation though, 2016 is the clear winner for recent years:


And precipitation was particularly important in 2016, considering how little of it we had had so far this year. Environment Canada has a combined Total Precipitation measurement that includes rain and snow, which is what I'm using here.
Source: Environment Canada http://climate.weather.gc.ca/glossary_e.html#totalPrec







Through last week we'd had a little under 40mm of precipitation so far in 2016. But with the rains of the last week that has pushed our total up above 130mm, and right around the average.

A note about this chart: normally I like to use the Blatchford weather station which is near downtown Edmonton, but for this last chart I'm using the Edmonton International Aiport instead. Blatchford's precipitation data for 2016 is complete, but its historical dataset has entire months that are missing. I wanted to compare 2016 precipitation against the average, but I can't reliably calculate one for Blatchford. So here I have switched to the International, and I'll probably use it again in the future anytime that I'm looking at precipitation, or maybe some combination of it and Blatchford.

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