Goodbye to April, Hello to May. We ended the month on a warm note, with a couple of stations recording their 2nd warmest April day on record. That’s for the whole month, for all years with data. This comes on the heels of two stations in Cartwright recording their all time max highs for April. The scary part about this is that it’s happening in the midst of regular spring weather. In other words, where the sun happens to shine, we’re consistently pushing the top 10% (or 90th percentile) of all recorded temperatures at a lot of locations.
One of the main reasons for that is that these are historically places that are pretty chilly this time of year, so regular spring time temperatures for other places are record breaking for these spots. However, that’s the whole point. It’s not supposed to be this warm here yet. There’s supposed to be a bunch of sea ice all along the northeast coast, northeast flow with drizzle and fog used to mean cold, dank, and miserable. While it’s not sunshine and daisies, it’s actually not that bad this week. (Ok, so arguably, warmer northeast flow doesn’t feel like a bad thing. But… the price we have to pay for that may change your mind on how you feel about it later) Anyway, I dunno what else to say about this that hasn’t already been said a million times by now, so I shall digress.
If we focus on the here and now, we do have some lingering rainfall warnings in effect in Labrador, and here are the specifics on the records set yesterday in southwestern Newfoundland. Note that Port aux Basques was only 0.1 degrees away from tying the all time April high.