November Heatwave Recap

It looks like our little heatwave is over, so lets take a look back at the last week or two.

For some reason Environment Canada is actually missing data for most of this month:

Thankfully, they do still have the Hourly recordings, so I can use those instead of the Daily data. The Hourly data doesn't always match the daytime highs & lows though, which is kindof annoying. Since we're going to be looking at records I'd really prefer to be more exact, but we'll work with what we've got...

Daytime Highs

Here are the daytime highs. From November 3rd through the 14th we set 5 recent records, and for the days that weren't actually the highest, many were the second highest since 1995.

What's really interesting is comparing the beginning of November to all of October, with November being 15°C-20°C warmer in some cases.

Daytime Lows

The story for the Lows is similar, with 7 recent records over those 12 days. And most of the Lows were well above what we saw in October.

Here are the tables with the actual numbers:

The main thing to take from these tables is the colours.

The orange highs that we see during the last two weeks are pretty unusual. We haven't had anything comparable recently, but back in 2005 there was a string of 9 days between 9°C and 15°C, and that one started really late on the 17th of November, and it lasted until the 25th. 2001 also had a 9 day streak, from the 8th through the 16th.

So far this month we had 9 days above 10°C, and 10 nights that stayed above 0°C, and both of those numbers are higher than any year going back to 1997.

Records

Right before this heatwave started I had looked at the 50 warmest days recorded for this time of year. Those charts have been reshaped quite a bit in the last week:



Looking at the 50 warmest days going back to 1985, the large grey block on the right side of this chart is 2016. The last 12 days now hold 11 of the top spots, including 1st through 3rd.

Looking back at all of recorded history, this heatwave had 3 days in the top 50, including all-time records on the 4th and 8th (although again with the caveat that I've had to use the Hourly data, rather than the Daily data that I normally would).

The Race for Warmest Year

This heatwave did a nice job of keeping 2016 in the race for warmest-recorded-year. The beginning of November basically undid the giant dip that we had at the beginning of October. With a month-and-a-half to go we'll have to see where 2016 ends up.