Throughout the course of a year, Canadians deal with all sorts of extreme weather conditions from extreme heat to extreme cold. We consulted Meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, Kyle Fougere about some of the more extreme weather patterns in 2021.

Last year, we kicked the year off with a little bit warmer weather until February hit.

“We had a pretty mild winter last year until February hit and then we had a cold snap in February that was really cold and there were some records that were set with that. On February 8th, there was a new record set in Lacombe of minus 40.5 which beat the old record of minus 39.4 that was set in 1936,” said Fougere who noted that it was quite an old record.

Although the spring was relatively normal, into the summer, we experienced a pretty lengthy heat wave along with much of the rest of Alberta and British Columbia.

File photo.

“The other part of the story was that at the end of June there was a real heat wave that affected basically all of Alberta and Western BC created all the fires in BC. There was one day on June 30th where Lacombe did set a new record at 34.9 degrees, beating the old record of 31.7 that was set in 1924,” explained Fougere.

Fougere says several records in Western Canada were broken during that June heatwave.

“With this heat wave, a lot of places we're setting records multiple days. It's kind of surprising that Lacombe actually only set one record with that heat wave we had,” he added.

With that extreme heat much of Western Canada closed out the summer under smoky conditions from the forest fires in BC and Alberta. 

Into the fall, Lacombe dipped back into some cooler than normal temperatures.

“There were two other record low daily temperatures that were set this year on October 13th and 14th. October 13th was minus 10.1 and it was minus 9.1 on October 14th,” said Fougere.

In total, that means there were three records broken for record low daily temperatures and only for record high daily temperatures.

“Normally it's pretty typical to see a couple[weather records broken] because we do see such extreme weather come through whether it's these cold snaps or really hot warm stretches. It's not unusual to see a record or two of these daily records to fall every year,” added Fougere.

And of course we wouldn't want to end off the year without some more records broken. During the last weeks of 2021, extreme cold weather warnings were issued for the entire Province of Alberta and 43 communities in B.C. and Alberta reported record breaking low temperatures on Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

Fingers crossed, we will have a great year weather wise in 2022.