Record Watch: Valentine's Day

Normally I look at weather history for long-weekends, and we will be back in a few days to check-in on Family Day.

But for today, the temperatures this Valentine's Day are supposed to be potentially record-breaking:

In recent years our average high on February 14th has been -3°C, and the average low -11°C. And in there we've had some warm years like 2016 at 5.6°C and 2011 at 7.5°C, or cooler years like 2009 at -11.4°C. We haven't had a super-cold Valentine's Day in a long time though - 2007 was chilly with a low of -22.4°C, but a reasonably nice high of -7.4°C. For a true deepfreeze you have to go all the way back to 1979 with a high of -24.1°C and a low of -35.1°C.

Right now the record temperatures for Valentine's Day were all set a long time ago. The warmest-ever-recorded Valentine's day was 1907, with a high of 10.6°C. 1981 came close to that though, reaching 10.3°C. The forecast high for today is 10°C, so there's a chance that we'll break the record today.

As usual though, whenever I look at records I like to look at the entire week, and not just a single day. And here we see the 50 warmest days (57 actually, because there's a tie again) for this week of February.

While the record for February 14th is 10.6°C, that's actually pretty low compared to most of the other days this week: the records for the 12th and 18th are both above 12°C, for the 16th it's 13.3°C, and the 15th has the warmest record at 13.9°C. So if we do break a record on the 14th, it's worth remembering that it's a pretty low-hanging fruit.

To get into the top-50 the temperatures need to beat 7.8°C, so this past Monday is included at 9.7°C, but the warm Sunday misses out at 7.4°C.

Looking at all of the years, there were lots of warm days this week in the 1890s, 1910s, 1930s and 1980s, but there hasn't been too much since then. After the week is over I'll be back to update this chart to see the full impact of 2017.