Spring 2009 Summary

A wet spring with average temperatures

It was a little warm at times and a little cool at times, but the temperature for the spring never really took hold one way or the other for any long stretches except near the end. The final numbers put the daytime highs about 0.6 degrees below average and the nighttime lows about 0.2 degrees below. This works out to 0.4 degrees less than average overall and that's close enough to zero to make the temperature average for the spring.

But for those who thought it seemed really cold this year, it was the coldest spring since 2003. Also, when you look at the graph of the recent temperatures you can see that it has been pretty steady since late May (the last time we had a daytime high that was more than a full degree above average was back on May 24th) and I think this has made people really wonder if the warmer temperature are ever going to arrive.

We had had a pretty consistent rate of precipitation for the spring as we were always hanging around the border between the average and above average range. In the end, the total precipitation for the season was 264.6 mm, which is just 0.2 mm above the average range and thus we can call it an above average spring for precipitation. This also made it the wettest spring since 2004.

There were no particularly large storms during the season (the highest daily precipitation was 29.4 mm, pretty good, but not spectacular) and no extremely long periods of dry conditions, just 11 dry days in April.

I was also reading over the summary from the past winter and I ended that one by pointing out that we usually get about 13 cm of snow during the spring, just to finish that thought, we ended up getting 10.5 cm, so pretty much an average spring for snowfall.


Summary for Spring 2009:
Maximum Temperature 26.3 °C
Minimum Temperature -8.5 °C
Average Daily High Temperature 15.2 °C (Long term average 15.9 °C)
Average Daily Low Temperature 4.2 °C (Long term average 4.4 °C)
Total Precipitation 264.6 mm (Long term average 219.5 mm)

(Long term averages based on 1970-2000 data for the Waterloo Wellington Airport)

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