22.5 degrees, record temperature in western Canada in December

Following global concerns over the sweltering heat last summer when it hit its all-time high, a region in western Canada this week endured a new record rise on the thermometer upon reaching 22.5 degrees Celsius.

Pentiction, located in the center of the province of British Columbia, in the Canadian west, has suffered for several months severe weather disturbances and on Wednesday he recorded this unusual temperature.

“It is a record, or it equals a record to be precise,” he said this Thursday to the AFP, Armel Castellan, Meteorologist at the Canadian Ministry of the Environment.

On December 3, 1982, Canada had already registered a temperature of 22.5 degrees Celsius in the town of Hamilton, Ontario, in the east of the country, according to the expert.

Pentiction, which has about 33,000 inhabitants, is located a few hundred kilometers from Lytton, another municipality 250 kilometers northeast of Vancouver, where the all-time temperature record was recorded in Canada last June, when 49.6 degrees Celsius were reached. Lytton was 90% destroyed by a wildfire.

In Pentiction “the temperature record was 11.2 in 2012, and yesterday the maximum temperature was 22.5 degrees, a record,” he explained to the AFP Gregory Yang, a meteorologist at the Canadian Ministry of the Environment.

This region of British Columbia is the same that suffered this summer the effects of the ceiling “historic” heat that caused more than 500 deaths as well as a wave of serious fires.

“Since September we have had a lot, a lot of heat that comes to us from the subtropical region,” explained Castellan, who described the figure as “very, very impressive for a day in December in any region of the country.”

For about a week, a “atmospheric river“Looms over southwestern British Columbia, the third of the season, he said.

Violent rainfall caused catastrophic floods since mid-November in the province, events linked to the effects of climate change, according to authorities.

Why it worries that the poles of the Earth are less and less white

Climate change accelerates one of the strongest currents on Earth

Recent studies show the direct responsibility of climate change in certain heat waves. Such as the extraordinary heatwave in Canada in June 2021 with temperatures close to 50 degrees Celsius, a phenomenon that would have been “almost impossible” without global warming, according to scientists at the World Weather Attribution.

Unusual winter heat swept across the northwestern United States, where heat records for December were broken or equaled at various points in Washington, Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota on Wednesday.

The temperatures in those places could be almost 20 degrees Celsius higher than normal.

On Thursday, this warm front moved towards the center of the country, with, for example, a heat record for a December 2 registered in Omaha, Nebraska, where it reached 20 degrees on Thursday afternoon.

Alert system

The western United States has faced increasingly severe weather hazards in recent years, particularly in California.

The authorities of that state plan to implement in 2022 a heat wave warning system which would classify each of these episodes according to the number of feared deaths in order to promote preventive measures.

As with hurricanes, each heat wave would be given a name and a hazard classification.

Instead of being content with saying “there will be 40.5 ° C”, the alert would indicate “how many people are going to dieLarry Kalkstein, scientific advisor to the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation, which promotes this initiative, says in the Washington Post.

Kalkstein’s team predicts three categories of heat waves.

An index 1 phenomenon would not present a higher risk, with an increase in mortality between 0% and 10%.

Category 3 would be much more deadly, comparable to exceptional heat wave which hit the northwestern United States and British Columbia last June. (I)