Victoria Day Weekend 2019

The Victoria Day Long Weekend (or May Long Weekend) has a pretty bad reputation for weather, but is that justified? Let's take a look:


Temperatures

The last two Victoria Day weekends - 2017 & 2018 - were both very warm, with Highs above 20°C, and each with a day above 25°C.

The 2016 weekend was not warm, with Highs down around 5-10°C. That was the coldest Victoria Day weekend since 1995, and the warmest was 2008.

Generally though, the average High is 16.6°C, and the average Low is 5.7°C. And Lows below freezing are fairly rare, with 1995, 2009 & 2015 each having one.


Precipitation

One of the reasons the Victoria Day 2016 wasn't warm was because it was very rainy, with a total of 80.6mm of rain at the International. We talked about that in 2016 May Long Weekend Post-Mortem. And since 1995 both 2009 and 2010 recorded a bit of snow.

We've done these write-ups for Victoria Day a few times now, and

• It's rarely above 25°C (5 times since 1995, including 2017 & 2018)
• It's rarely below 0°C (3 times since 1995, most recently in 2015)
• It's above 20°C less than half of the time
• 75% of the time there's at least one genuinely rainy day, and 85% of the time there's at least a little rain.

We'll be back in a few days with an update once the weekend is over.


Update with 2019 Numbers:

The May long weekend 2019 had 4 days with Highs between 16-19°C, and Lows between 3-7°C. And that put the temperatures right on the average.

And it was another May long weekend with no precipitation at the Edmonton International (or at Blatchford).