It’s over. Almost. Enjoy the last day of spring.

A lack of rain could spell trouble moving forward

Not too hot, not too cold, and not much rain.

That’s how Environment Canada climatologist David Phillips sums up the spring we’ve had.

Looking back, he says the transition from winter to summer began in March with temperatures up to 20 Celsius. April was equally warm with above normal temperatures. May was cooler, though we did get up to 30 Celsius on two occasions. June has been warm for the most part.

What’s been missing, says Phillips, is rain, “We have seen, since January, every month has had less than normal precipitation. If we looked at it right now in terms of, say, January the first to the middle of June, we’ve had maybe 55 per cent of what we normally would get, so farmers feel it, you look around and you see the grass is looking like the dog days of summer, a little more brittle.”

The hard numbers tell the tale – by this time last year we’d had 430 millimetres of rain. So far this year, we’ve had 237 millimetres, “and you pay for that later on. We’re entering the warm season … there’s a greater demand for precipitation … and already we’re in a deficit situation, so I think that sort of bears watching.”

Phillips says there’s no scientific explanation for the lack of rain; you can’t blame it on climate change. “It’s really just the fact that we’ve had a lot of near-misses, a lot of storms have gone just south of the Great Lakes, or they’ve gone well north. We’re almost in the weather-free zone here in southern Ontario.”

Phillips is quick to add things can change quickly. We could get a couple of good systems that come in and dump the rain, “and all of a sudden, what the problem was, has been corrected.”

Spring checks out at 11:31 Sunday night.

0 Shares
Tweet
Share
Share
Pin