‘Weird, wild and wacky’: Climatologist focuses on summer conditions

Extreme droughts, extreme flooding and extreme heat — Environment Canada climatologist David Phillips says there has been no shortage of “extremes” this summer around the world.

“It’s from one extreme to the other,” he told Gormley guest host Brent Loucks on Tuesday. “You don’t get normal weather; it’s almost from one extreme to the other. That Goldilocks weather of it not being too hot (or) too cold, it feels like it just doesn’t exist anymore.

“We’ve found that the climate is becoming weird, wild and wacky and it’s becoming almost a crapshoot.”

Parts of the U.S. are suffering from devastating flooding, while parts of China are dealing with the worst drought experienced in more than six decades.

Phillips says while all of this has been happening, Saskatchewan has been dealing with a completely different summer than what conditions were like this time last year.

“What a contrast it is,” Phillips said. “I’ve looked at Saskatchewan every month from June, July and August and it has been warmer than normal but it hasn’t been excruciatingly warm like last year.

“For example, the number of days above 30 degrees is often a mark of a hot summer. Regina, for example, has had 12 of those and Saskatoon has had 14 of them, while last year they had over 30 of those.”

Despite the change in temperature, Phillips says we’ve been dealing with something else chaotic as a result.

“It’s been more active this summer as we saw the rains in June, July (had) the storms and August has been the heat,” Phillips said. “In July there were a lot of storms that came in almost every week.

“It just shows you this year you have had too much weather and last year you didn’t have enough weather. We like balance in life (and) we like that balance in weather too.”

Farmers have been dealing with the chaos this summer has thrown their way. Depending on the region, some farmers 980 CJME has spoken with have said they haven’t seen a summer like this in more than 30 years.

Despite what feels like a more active summer with tornadoes, Environment Canada has said the number of tornadoes has remained close to our yearly average of 17.

Weird, wild and wacky summers like the one Phillips is describing won’t only cause stress now, but going forward as well.

“You might have learned in school — or our teachers told us — that this is what Saskatchewan weather is like,” the climatologist said. “They might have said, ‘Oh, you might see an extreme once every 50 years.’

“But it’s not supposed to be back to back to back and that really requires innovation and it adds a lot of stress to rural communities.”

Based on summers like this, the weather office says it’s only getting more challenging to analyze what summers could look like in the future.