Snow + Rain
In the past few weeks I was updating this chart constantly, as April kept getting soggier and soggier. But here is the final version, showing the Snow and Rain totals for the month.
With 43.2cm of snow 2017 just crept in as snowiest-ever April at the International, barely beating out 2002 at 43.1cm. And 29mm of rain put 2017 as the International's 6th rainiest April.
Adding those up gives 72.2mm of Rain + Snow, making 2017 the International's soggiest April, well ahead of 2nd place 1990 with 60.6mm.
For the rest of the charts today we're going to narrow the timeframe, and just look at the more recent years going back to 1995.
Days with Precipitation
In Part 1 we saw that April 2017 was cold, but it wasn't really cold. It still had a lot of people grumbling though, and I think this chart had a lot to do with that.
In April 2017 we had 16 days with precipitation, which is about double the average for April. 16 days wouldn't be unusual during our July monsoon season, but during July a lot of our rain comes as evening thundershowers, so you don't necessarily notice it as much. But April 2017 was pretty cold, as well as pretty gloomy.
Total Precipitation
Comparing April's total precipitation to other months, with 69mm we were well above the average for April, and roughly inline with June.
I've included 2016 in this chart as a reference, because last year started out so dry - including the fire in Fort McMurray, but also firebans throughout the province. In 2016 Edmonton didn't get any significant precipitation until the very rainy Victoria Day weekend.
(and just a note that Environment Canada's Total Precipitation measurement is a little bit different from Rain + Snow, which I talked about here. But April 2017's 69mm is still well ahead of 2nd place 1990 with 61mm.)
Rain
Here are our rain totals so far for the year, which give us an idea of what we have to look forward to.
29mm of Rain is a lot for April, but recently in 2010 we had 36.8mm, and the all-time record was 49.2mm in 1990. And to put things in perspective, last April we barely got any rain, but then in May we had 107mm.
But of course rain wasn't the only precipitation that we got this April:
As we saw earlier, with 43cm of snow, 2017 just barely snuck in as the snowiest April ever recorded at the International. It was also the snowiest month of the winter of 2016-2017 by far, making up 31% of our total for the winter.
Looking at 2015-2016, the snow totals were very similar during the middle of winter from November through February. But 2016-2017 started off strong with a snowy October, and finished with a very snowy March, and then the record-breaking April.
Total Snow
When we add all of the snow for the winter together we get this.
The snowy October pushed us up above average to start to start the winter off, but then for most of the winter we were a little below average. March gave us a boost up though, and then April pushed us up to the 75th percentile.
2015-2016 is included as a comparison again, and it spent the whole winter hanging out around the record-lows.
With 139cm so far, 2016-2017 is right around the recent average. In recent years 2010-2011 and 2013-2014 all crossed the 150cm mark, but we're nowhere close to a really snowy year like 2002-2003 which had 225cm.
And now the final word on snow (at least until next month...)
Even though 2016-2017 ends up being a reasonably snowy winter, we were on the low-side in terms of snowdepth. Two-thirds of our snow came during the relatively warmish months of October, March & April, and that melted pretty quickly. During the middle of winter the snowfall was below average, and we also had a few solid chinooks in January and February to keep things from building up.
Blatchford
And finally for today, we'll take a quick look at Blatchford. Normally for precipitation I use Environment Canada's measurements from the International Airport, because the data there is better. But for a truly historic perspective, we need to go back to Blatchford.
In April 2017 Blatchford measured 69.8mm of precipitation. We don't know how much of that is Rain vs. Snow, because unfortunately they stopped recording that in 2007. But going back to 1881, that's enough combined precipitation to put April 2017 in 3rd place, just behind 1948 with 72.4mm, but well below 1955 with 88.1mm.
So April 2017 is one for the record books: the snowiest April at the International, the soggiest April at the International, and the 3rd soggiest April at Blatchford.
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