Southern Quebec went through its earliest heat wave on record, according to Environment Canada, where many heat records were broken. In addition, the province is experiencing many more forest fires than usual this spring.
Posted at 3:27 p.m.
Environment Canada has no formal criteria for declaring a heat wave, recalls Frédérick Boulay, meteorologist at the federal agency. By convention, however, we speak of a heat wave period when the mercury reaches the 30 ° C mark three days in a row, which materialized on Saturday.
“It’s the earliest heat wave ever recorded,” said Mr. Boulay. “Observations have been collected since the end of the 19th century.and century. The earliest before this occurred in 1911, around May 20. »
“We are going to see more and more heat waves” with climate change, notes the meteorologist. ” It’s a certainty. »
In Montreal, Environment Canada instruments already indicated 29.4°C between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. Saturday, while the air should continue to warm up during the afternoon. On Thursday and Friday, the temperature exceeded 30°C and many regions broke heat records.
“We broke records all over Quebec on Thursday, the 12th, and on the 13th, it was generalized,” explains Mr. Boulay. “We broke records from Val-d’Or to Saguenay, then down all over the south. »
In Montreal, heat records were broken from Thursday to Saturday. “The 12th was a daily record, we observed 30.3°C. The old record was 28.9°C in 1893 […]. [Vendredi], we reached 31.2°C with an old record of 28.5°C in 1992”, explains the meteorologist. On Saturday, the old record of 29.2 ° C, recorded in 2004, was also beaten.
Many more forest fires
The Society for the Protection of Forests Against Fire (SOPFEU) indicates on its website that already 220 forest fires had broken out in Quebec this year as of Saturday, a hundred more than the average of the last 10 years over the same period. . The blazes affected more than 222 hectares, more than double the average for the last 10 years at the same date.
“We had a stationary anticyclone over the province, which brought us good weather for about two weeks. There was therefore little or no precipitation in southern Quebec,” observes Mr. Boulay, which “increases the risk of forest fires.”
The Ministry of Forests, Wildlife and Parks, in collaboration with SOPFEU, banned open fires in or near forests earlier this month in many regions of Quebec, ranging from Montérégie to Bas-Saint- Lawrence.