After another cold Victoria Day weekend people are wondering if there is any historical pattern that suggests the holiday is abnormally cold.
Well in the past 11 years the Victoria Day weekend has been the coldest weekend of the month 3 times, the warmest 4 times and somewhere in the middle the others. So that is pretty much what you would expect on average.
Something that does support the theory is that the past 10 months of May have been a 50/50 mix of above and below average temperatures for the month overall. However, only once has the average temperature over the Victoria Day long weekend been above the average temperature for that time of the month.
In the end I think that people just remember the really cold long weekends, for instance when it went below zero during 2002 and 2005. The temperature is probably also more memorable when you are directly experiencing it around a campfire or in a tent.
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4 comments:
Queen Victoria has nothing to do with it.
In the old days, when I was a kid, the Victoria Day Weekend was virtually always nice weather.
Which is why in this locality it was generally the safe time to get your spring planting done. So most people with vegetable gardens spent the Victoria Day Weekend planting things like tomato plants, which might have been wiped out by frost if planted earlier.
So what has changed since then? Only two things I know of.
First, what they used to call "global warming", but now more accurately call "climate change". My two favorite seasons, spring and fall, no longer come with any predictability (if at all).
We go directly from the winter freeze to summer sunbathing temperatures, as early as February some years. And then, when everyone has liberated their t-shirts and sandals, we're back to winter. (Like this week.)
This of course can wreak havock with plants... Magnolia trees flower too early then have the blossoms wiped out by frost. My rose bush flowered and wilted in a day due to excessive unseasonable heat. And for several years now it's been difficult to get fresh strawberries that haven't been damaged by weather "mood swings".
A few years back my sister-in-law was upset by her tomato plants being killed by frost in late June.
My dog still hasn't lost his winter coat, which is good today, but nearly killed him when it was 25 degrees celcius 2 months ago. Climate change.
As long as "climate change" is allowed to run rampant and humanity makes no real effort to alter the course of the damage we continue to do to the environment, this unpredictability will only get worse.
I must point out here that, even in the face of the drastic climate change, the science of weather forecasting seems to have become dramatically more accurate than it was in my youth. They seem to get it right more than half the time these days!
Getting back to Queen Victoria, the other, "man-made" difference in the Victoria Day weekend seems to be that the powers that be (whoever they are) have decreed that the Victoria Day weekend must fall one week BEFORE the American "Memorial Day", whenever that is decreed to take place.
This is downright wrong. "Victoria Day" was never just a date pulled out of a hat and designated a holiday simply as a means to honour an amazing monarch. Or provide a well needed spring holiday.
The REAL Victoria Day is May 24th, not May 19th like we were forced to celebrate it this year. Queen Victoria's birthday was 24 May 1819. As a British Commonwealth country, Canada chose to celebrate Victoria Day in tribute to her, with a holiday on her Birthday.
My mother taught us this poem in my childhood, which she in turn had learned in her childhood (Victoria reign ended in 1901 after all... I'm not >that< old):
The twenty-fourth of May
Is the Queen's birthday
If we don't get a holiday
We'll all run away!
Presumably they started rescheduling Victoria Day to ensure that it coincided with a weekend. OBVIOUSLY that is not what governs it now, as you can hardly get more deeply into a weekend than the Saturday that Victoria's birthday actually falls on this year!
In the old days, Victoria Day was ALWAYS 24 May. If I am not mistaken, it usually fell the weekend after the American Memorial day, but sometimes on the same weekend.
I expect the justification for this wrongheaded decision is to make it possible for American shoppers to cross border shop on their holiday, and allow Canadian shoppers to cross border shop on ours. Can you imagine the outcry south of the border if the bureaucrats tried to monkey with George Washington's birthday?
But since the political bureaucrats have arbitrarily altered the timing of "Victoria Day", it is no wonder that the weather is even more likely to be unpredictable, being that much earlier in the year. So if you're using Victoria Day to decide when to risk your seedlings, use the REAL Victoria Day as your guide-- the 24th of May!
But particularly with her birthdate so callously cast aside, you can hardly blame Queen Victoria.
Just so people know I removed a duplicate post by lothlaurien, it was not removed because of its content.
According to Uncle Wikipedia, Victoria Day in Canada has been the Monday on or before the 24th since 1952.
I'd be interested to know if variations in spring/fall temperatures actually have been increasing over the last several decades. My guess is that, if they have, it's only slightly and only because increases at the high end are outpacing increases at the low end. I don't hear a whole lot of new record lows being reported. Consider this spring: in April, we had a slew of days in the neighbourhood of ten degrees above normal, whereas my guess is there has only been one day in May that much below normal. But I'm doing a lot of guessing here (and I'm posting from inside the Toronto heat bubble).
One remarkable thing about the April warm spell: the fact that the forecasts underestimated it day after day helped show just how accurate forecasts have become--in the age of computer modelling, blown forecasts like that hardly ever happen anymore (and the TV weathergerbils, as I like to call them, get to look smart all the time).
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