44,000 Hits

Wow, ValleyWeather surpassed 44,000 hits yesterday morning. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading. Many of you have asked me weather questions, and friends and co-workers often ask me the weekend forecast and I thank you as well. I always have time to talk weather and have for the last 30 years, since September 1979 when I tracked my first hurricane - David - along the east coast of Florida and started recording daily weather.

My interest in weather actually started much earlier during the winter of 1971 when a fierce March snowstorm closed down Montreal for several days. It caught my young attention span and managed to keep me still for a day just watching the weather outside. Hurricane force winds and 45cm of snow in one day will do that. There have been so many memorable weather events in those 30 years. Some that stand out are the day the Decarie and most of Montreal flooded on July 14, 1987, and shortly after that the terrible Edmonton tornado on the 31st of July 1987. Hurricanes Hugo, Andrew and Katrina, just to name a few. Others are the 1998 Ice Storm, my first tornado in Saskatchewan in 1998, Tropical Storm Allison in June 1995 on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the Halloween Nor’Easter in 1991 (the Perfect Strom) and the March 1993 east coast super storm. That storm on March 13, 1993 (43cm) was the only day that I could not get the Montreal Gazette newspaper out to the paper carriers and stores in my entire career at the paper. There are so many more events, too many to mention them all.

Anyway it has been a very challenging year personally for me and I have not always updated ValleyWeather as often as I would have liked to. So for sticking with me I thank you again. I will be relocating in a few weeks and setting up my home weather station again, so I hope to have better and more local weather information and maybe even a web cam in the near future.

Be good and be safe…

**Today will be cloudy across the region and chilly with northeast winds in Montreal, and no better than 9C for a high temperature. Showers are possible especially south of the city towards the U.S. border. Skies will clear out for Thursday and it will be sunny and mild into Friday. It looks like Halloween will be wet, but there is still time for the forecast to change and a window of opportunity for tricks and treats to open up. Next week looks cooler, with a chance of some snow again by mid week.