The Bananarama lyrics from its 1983 song sums up the summer of 2023 in Ottawa perfectly, “It’s a cruel, cruel summer.”
The capital has seen heavy rain, flash flooding, three tornadoes and air quality warnings due to wildfire smoke this summer, and only 15 days without rain since the start of July.
“When you look at July and August, we’ve had double the amount of rain,” Environment Canada senior climatologist David Phillips said last week. “Those 42 days from the first of July to (Aug. 10), 27 were wet. Some of them were little traces, but they were wet.”
Of the 28 days with rain since July 1 (counting the Aug. 12 rainfall), Ottawa has had five days with at least 20 mm of rain, including Aug. 10 when some areas of the capital received nearly 100 mm of rain.
Phillips was asked on Newstalk 580 CFRA’s Ottawa at Work with Patricia Boal on Friday, “What have we done to make someone angry? So I have to ask you the question, is this our new normal here.”
“That’s a hard question to answer,” Phillips said.
“I think this year, you’d get kind of a bias thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, nature has it in for you.’ It is the year of the smoke, the year of the tornadoes, the year of the big flood; I mean what more could there be, it’s almost biblical in a way.”
Hydro Ottawa says “Mother Nature was not gentle to Ottawa’ in July, with eight times more lightning strikes than the previous year and 139 power outages.
There were also several days of poor air quality at the end of June and the start of July, as smoke from wildfires in northern Ontario and Quebec drifted into the Ottawa area.
CTVNewsOttawa.ca looks at the weather stats from a wet summer in Ottawa.
Rainfall
A total of 236.5 mm of rain has been recorded at the Ottawa International Airport weather station since July 1.
- July: 142.4 mm
- Aug. 94.1 mm
The 94.1 mm of rain includes the 38.3 mm of rain recorded at the airport during the Aug. 10 severe storm. Environment Canada says the weather station at the Central Experimental Farm recorded 78 mm of rain on Thursday, while some areas saw nearly 100 mm of rain.
Days with more than 20 mm of rain.
- July 16 – 33.2 mm
- July 21 – 23.8 mm
- July 27 – 22 mm
- Aug. 7 – 36.9 mm
- Aug. 10 – 38.3 mm (Some areas of Ottawa saw nearly 100 mm of rain)
People walk through flood waters on Meadowlands Drive in Ottawa during Thursday’s storm. (Jim O’Grady/CTV News Ottawa)
Tornadoes
Three tornadoes have touched down in Ottawa this summer, damaging homes and properties in the south end of the city.
On July 13, two tornadoes touched down in Barrhaven. Western University’s Northern Tornadoes Project says the two tornadoes were classified as EF1, with maximum wind speeds of 155 km/h. The two tornadoes left paths of damage approximately 1 km and 5 km long.
On Aug. 3, an EF0 tornado with a maximum wind of 130 km/h touched down in the Findlay Creek area.
Thunderbolts and lightning
“July was not a typical summer month. Mother nature was not gentle to Ottawa,” Hydro Ottawa said in a statement.
Statistics released by the utility show there were up to eight times more lightning strikes in Ottawa in July compared to a year ago. There were 6,066 lighting strikes within a 650 km radius of the Ottawa International Airport, according to Hydro Ottawa.
In July 2022, there were 738 lightning strikes in Ottawa.
Hydro Ottawa says there were 138 power outages in Ottawa in July, with the average restoration time of 3.3 hours. There were 91 total outages in July 2022.
Primary cause of power outages in July 2023, according to Hydro Ottawa
- Foreign interference (animal and vehicle contact, vandalism): 35 outages
- Tree contacts: 25 outages
- Adverse weather: 7 outages
- Lightning storms: 7 outages
- Loss of supply from provincial grid: 2 outages
Hydro Ottawa released a graphic on weather related events in Ottawa in July. (Source: Hydro Ottawa)
The rest of the summer
Environment Canada says temperatures will hover around normal for this time of year over the next four weeks.
The monthly forecast looking at temperatures for the next 28 days calls for seasonal temperatures for Ottawa and eastern Ontario between Aug. 14 and Sept. 11.
The seasonal forecast for precipitation in Ottawa for August, September and October calls for above normal rainfall levels.
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