Remember at the beginning of the summer when headlines across the country were saying that Prince Edward Island was in for a typical run-of-the-mill summer this year, and I was called upon to make a prediction. The Weather Network and Environment Canada said that the summer of 2014 would be “normal”; the Old Farmer’s Almanac said “warmer and wetter”; I said “warmer and drier”; and I had my colleague flip a coin (to demonstrate the integration of probability into the science of forecasting) who said it would be “colder and wetter”. Well, the observations are now recorded – the summer of 2014 was warmer and drier than normal.

Normally, a PEI summer (the months of June, July and August) has an average temperature of 17.6 degrees Celsius and receives about 28 cm of rain. This represents the “climate normal” or the average of 30 years of data, in this case the most recent climate normal titled 1981-2010.  Last year’s summer (2013) was 0.5 degrees Celsius warmer than “normal”, and 30 percent drier than “normal”. But what about this year? Well, let the record show that the summer of 2014 was about 0.8 degrees Celsius warmer than normal (even warmer than 2013) and about 10 percent drier than normal. Less than 1 degree Celsius warmer may not seem like much, but we must remember that the average global temperatures were only 6 degrees Celsius cooler during the last ice age when we had kilometres of glacier ice above our heads in North America. There were 15 extreme hot days during the summer of 2014, three more extreme days than the summer of 2013. “Extreme hot days” are defined by Occupational Health Canada as those days when the maximum temperature exceeds 27.5 degrees Celsius above which it is recommended that outdoor workers have a break every hour.

The summer weather continued to play havoc with our lives this year. Canada’s Governor General David Johnston, on P.E.I. for four days in June to mark the 150th anniversary of the Charlottetown Conference, missed the morning scheduled events of the first day due to the wet and foggy weather that wouldn’t allow his plane to land on time. Post-tropical storm Arthur was the big weather story of the summer with strong winds sinking three boats in the yacht club in downtown Charlottetown, and cutting power to roughly 5,000 Maritime Electric customers. The storm caused the cancelling of all of the Saturday night performances of the Cavendish Beach Music Festival when travel woes grounded country-music stars Blake Shelton and Darius Rucker. And the PEI 2014 Celebration Zone at Confederation Landing in Charlottetown was closed the day following the storm while staff assessed the site for damage. Arthur also caused some crop damage to the Island’s ripe strawberries by the wind pushing the stems into the fruit. And while one of P.E.I.’s piping plover nests was lost in the storm due to flooding, these endangered species fared better than feared with all of the chicks surviving in the other nests.

The summer weather also brought some positive things. The approximately 200 blueberry farmers on P.E.I. had a bumper crop due to the heat this summer with a sizable yield of larger-than-usual berries. Tourism operators with the Harbour Hippo welcomed the summer’s warmth in July as they recorded sold out tours beginning in July. And several pool and hot tub companies on P.E.I. continued record sales from last year fuelled by this July’s humid weather.

As the sunshine and warmth turn to grey skies and cold, remember the summer of 2014 as one of warmth and dryness. And keep our fingers crossed as December approaches that the winter will not be as severely cold and snowy as last year.

. CLIVE, the coastal erosion visualization tool created by UPEI’s Climate Research Lab and the Spatial Interface Lab at Simon Fraser University, has reached the FINALS in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s CoLab Communicating Coastal Risk and Resilience contest. Now it needs your votes to help it win the Popular Choice award. Register to vote at the  contest website (http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/1300801/planId/1309316). Nearly 600 projects were submitted to MIT’s Climate CoLab for this year’s competition. CLIVE made it through several rounds of competition and broke through to the finals against two other projects. It is eligible for the “Popular Choice Award,” as determined by online voting, and for the “Judges Choice Award,” based on the project’s merits as determined by a panel of judges. Voting is currently open and runs until September 30. Log on and vote to support this great initiative!

. Remember the 2015 PEI Weather Trivia Calendar can still be purchased at peiweathercalendar.ca or at your local Murphy’s Pharmacy.

Questions? Contact Adam Fenech at afenech@upei.ca or (902) 620-5220