Warmest March day on record

Global Warming? Just another March day in Ontario and Quebec. CTV.ca

After reviewing the data from Wednesday, Environment Canada has listed the official high at Trudeau Airport in Montreal at 25.8C or about 78F. This makes it the warmest Montreal March day since record keeping began back in the early 1900's and edges a 67 year old record of 25.6C set in 1945. I would say this spell of warm weather now qualifies as historic. The icing on the spring/summer cake is today as we have already broke the record high of 15C set in 1946, the 5th day in a row. Montreal was still at 17C as the new day started so the record was broken in the wee hours of the morning. With advancing cloud cover today and a few showers and thunderstorms forecast, we should make it to about 22C, still an incredible 17 degrees above the normal high for March 22.

Hundreds of records fell all over Ontario, Quebec and New England yesterday, too many to mention. Some notables were 27C at St. Anicet/Lancaster, 27.4 at Ottawa, and 81F at both Massena, NY and Burlington, Vermont. One of the warmest temperatures in the country was an incredible 28.8C (84F) at Petawawa in Ontario. That destroyed the previous record of 12.2C set in 1976 and was 23 degrees above normal.

Reality will very slowly settle back in this weekend with more normal air moving into the region and temperatures settling down to the single digits for highs and possibly below freezing for lows by Sunday.