The Revenant

This year the winter weather in southern Alberta made the news, as a chinook swept through and affected the filming of The Revenant. The movie needed snow, but the unseasonably warm temperatures didn't make for a convincing portrait of the midwest circa 1823.

So that raises the question, what was winter like back then?

I can't speak for the midwest in 1823, but Environment Canada does have data for Edmonton that goes all the way back to the winter of 1880-1881:

15C on November 15, 1880; 11C on December 12; 5C on January 5 and February 23; and 9C during the first week of March. Not surprisingly, it seems as though they really did have chinooks back then too.

Just lining the two graphs up, they're closer than I would have expected. Although a couple of those daytime highs down around -30C are pretty chilly.

If the daytime highs are surprisingly similar, the daytime lows are a different story:

The graphs still sort of line up in a few spots, but generally the 1880 data is shifted down 10 or 15 degrees. When it used to get cold, wow did it ever get cold.  In 2014-2015 the low flirted with -30 twice, but in 1880-1881 it was down into the -40s seven times.

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on this. These are just two years picked basically at random - choosing a different year one way or the other might tell a completely different story.

I assume that some of the warming seen here is due to Climate Change, while some of it is due to the heat-island effect. Edmonton is now a sprawling city, and its environment and surroundings are very different from however the temperature was measured 136 years ago. I do have some thoughts on how I might try to normalize-out the heat-island effect, but that will have to wait for another time.

For right now, I'm just content to try to imagine living in -44C without modern clothes, or insulation, or heating, or transportation, or plumbing.