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 \u201cnormal\u201d; the Old Farmer\u2019s Almanac said \u201cwarmer and wetter\u201d; I said \u201cwarmer and drier\u201d; and I had my colleague flip a coin (to demonstrate the integration of probability into the science of forecasting) who said it would be \u201ccolder and wetter\u201d. Well, the observations are now recorded \u2013 the summer of 2014 was warmer and drier than normal.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cclimate normal\u201d or the average of 30 years of data, in this case the most recent climate normal titled 1981-2010.\u00a0 Last year\u2019s summer (2013) was 0.5 degrees Celsius warmer than \u201cnormal\u201d, and 30 percent drier than \u201cnormal\u201d. 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. \u201cExtreme hot days\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
The summer weather continued to play havoc with our lives this year. Canada\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u00a0Beach Music Festival when travel woes grounded country-music stars Blake Shelton and Darius\u00a0Rucker. And the\u00a0PEI 2014 Celebration Zone at Confederation Landing in Charlottetown\u00a0was closed the day following the storm while\u00a0staff assessed the site for damage. Arthur also caused some crop damage to the Island\u2019s ripe strawberries by the wind pushing the stems into the fruit. And while one of P.E.I.\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s warmth in July as they recorded sold out tours beginning in July. And several pool and hot tub companies on P.E.I.\u00a0continued record sales from last year fuelled\u00a0by this July\u2019s humid weather.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
. CLIVE, the coastal erosion visualization tool created by UPEI\u2019s Climate Research Lab and the Spatial Interface Lab at Simon Fraser University, has reached the FINALS in the Massachusetts\u00a0Institute of Technology’s\u00a0CoLab Communicating Coastal Risk and Resilience\u00a0<\/a>contest. Now it needs your votes to help it win the Popular Choice award. Register to vote at the\u00a0 contest website<\/a> (http:\/\/climatecolab.org\/web\/guest\/plans\/-\/plans\/contestId\/1300801\/planId\/1309316). Nearly 600 projects were submitted to MIT\u2019s Climate CoLab for this year\u2019s competition. CLIVE made it through several rounds of competition and broke through to the finals against two other projects. It is eligible for the \u201cPopular Choice Award,\u201d as determined by online voting, and for the \u201cJudges Choice Award,\u201d based on the project\u2019s merits as determined by a panel of judges. Voting is currently open and runs\u00a0until September 30.\u00a0Log on and vote to support this great initiative!<\/p>\n . Remember the 2015 PEI Weather Trivia Calendar can still be purchased at peiweathercalendar.ca or at your local Murphy\u2019s Pharmacy.<\/p>\n Questions? Contact Adam Fenech at afenech@upei.ca or (902) 620-5220<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading