(Montreal) After arousing global concerns by suffocating this summer under a historic dome of heat, a region of western Canada has endured a new record rise in mercury this week… up to 22.5 ° C.
Penticton, in central British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province which has suffered repeated extreme weather events for several months, recorded this temperature on Wednesday.
“It’s a record, or it equals a record to be very precise,” Armel Castellan, meteorologist at Environment Canada told AFP on Thursday.
On December 3, 1982, Canada previously recorded a temperature of 22.5 degrees in Hamilton, Ontario, according to this expert.
Penticton, which has a population of some 33,000, is located a few hundred kilometers from Lytton, a municipality 250 kilometers northeast of Vancouver which recorded the historic record temperature in Canada at 49.6 degrees Celsius at the end of June, and which was 90% destroyed by forest fire.
In Penticton, “the absolute record was 11.2 in 2012, then yesterday the maximum temperature was 22.5, so it is sure that it is a record”, explained to AFP Gregory Yang, meteorologist at Environment Canada.
This region of the interior of British Columbia is also the one that suffered the effects of the “historic” heat dome this summer, which killed more than 500 people, followed by major fires.
“Since September, we have had a lot, a lot of heat coming to us from the subtropics”, explained Armel Castellan, describing the figure reached as “very, very impressive for any day in December and at any time. what part of the country ”.
For about a week now, an “atmospheric river” has been sweeping down southwestern British Columbia, “the third of three in the past week,” he said.
Heavy rains have caused catastrophic flooding since mid-November in the province, events that have been linked to the effects of climate change by authorities.
Recent studies show the direct responsibility of climate change in certain heat waves. Thus, the extraordinary heatwave in Canada in June 2021, with temperatures approaching 50 ° C, would have been “almost impossible” without the warming, according to scientists from the World Weather Attribution.