Record Watch: Mid-December

The forecast is calling for some very warm days in the next week, and there's a possibility that we might even break some records. Today we're going to look back at other warm temperatures from the week of December 7th through 13th.

50 Warmest Days

Here are the 50 warmest days for December 7-13, going back to 1880. In this top 50 we have temperatures ranging from the extremely warm December 10, 1913 at 15.6°C, down to seven days which hit 6.7°C.

It's maybe a bit surprising to see 2014 and 2015 in here, but they both had mini-heatwaves (or "don't-call-them-chinooks") at this point in December. 2014 even set an all-time record of 12°C on December 9th. The grey shading in this chart groups things by decade, and so far in the 2010s we have had 4 days in the top 50, but the real standout is the 1890s with 10 days.

We took an in-depth look at all-time records earlier this year in How Often Does Edmonton Break Temperature Records and Broken Records - Part 2. There are a few notable records for this week of December:

• December 12, 1880 at 10.6°C is currently Edmonton's longest-standing record. Edmonton still has 27 records which were set in the 1880s, but December 13 is the only one that goes all the way back 1880. 


• December 8 & 13 are low-hanging fruit, sitting down at 8.8°C and 8.4°C respectively. In Broken Records - Part 2 they were identified as two of the coldest records compared to their neighbours, while December 10 is one of the warmest compared to its neighbours. 

Recent History

Here we have December High temperatures for the last 20 years. From the colours we can see that High temperatures throughout December jump around a lot. It's pretty typical for December to have a cold week, a warm week, and then a bunch of days in the middle.

At this point last winter we had just plunged into a deepfreeze, which certainly happens sometimes. 2016 had one High down at -20°C, 2013 had one at -18°C, and 2009 had one High of -28°C. We talked about December 13, 2009 a bit here, but it set all-time records for coldest-High at -28.3°C, and coldest-Low at -36.7°C, and the International dropped to -46°C.

Thinking warmer thoughts, in both 2015 and 2014 this week of December had some days up at 7°C and 12°C. And that isn't particularly rare, with 2008, 2006, 2005, 2002 and 1998 all having strings of warm days. The only years here that had no days above freezing during this week were 2016, 2013, 2010, 2009 and 2003.

Finally for today, we'll end off with a reminder of how often Edmonton breaks temperature records:

December 12 Update

The initial forecasts for this week hadn't made it sound like the December 12, 1880 record of 10.6°C was at risk.

But now here we are on December 12th, and the forecast for today is 10°C. So we'll have to see how things go.

After this whole warmspell is over we'll do a full recap for some context.