The Prairies appear in Environment Canada’s top 10 weather stories of 2019

It was an extraordinary year for weather, according to Environment Canada’s David Phillips.

The senior climatologist has compiled a top-ten list of weather stories for the past 24 years and said it’s getting harder to keep it to 10 events as the weather has changed so much.

Here’s what he chose for 2019:

1. Record-setting Ottawa River flood for the second time in three years.
2. Active hurricane season further south leads to destructive storms in Atlantic Canada.
3. No-good prairie fall as Calgary and Winnipeg get hit by early and heavy snowstorms.
4. A brutally cold February across the country.
5. Record summer heat in the Arctic.
6. On the Prairies: Too dry early on; too wet (snow and rain) later.
7. Torrential rain forces some Quebec municipalities to postpone Halloween by a day.
8. Spring missing from Alberta through to Atlantic Canada. Ontario farmers face one of the latest starts to planting season.
9. Wet April weather causes Saint John River to flood again in New Brunswick.
10. Fewer fires, more burning. A reprieve of about 40 per cent from 2018’s record number of forest fires, but the amount of land charred only decreases by one-fifth.

Phillips said Saskatchewan was not without weather-related misery with farmers having one of the most difficult years ever.

“It was one of the driest beginnings to any growing season ever and then ended up to be just like a monsoonal kind-of harvest,” he said. “If you average all of the precipitation, it probably came out to be normal, but they didn’t experience it in a normal way.”

Phillips says in 2019, there was almost three times the amount of hail storms on the prairies compared to previous years.

With files from the Canadian Press and Environment and Climate Change Canada