Slow and steady won the race

Summer is officially behind us. Well, at least meteorological summer is; astronomical summer ends before sunrise on the morning of Sept. 23 this year.

June:

The summer of 2019 got off to a very slow start, with lots of cloud cover, lots of rain and not much heat. Across the board, June was cooler and wetter than normal. Both Sydney and Halifax recorded 166 mm of rain – almost double the normal rainfall for June.

July:

Summer started to come around by the middle of July. A warm second half of the month made up for a cool start, at least in some places. Average temperatures were above normal across New Brunswick, mainland Nova Scotia and western Labrador but below for Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton

and Newfoundland.

Why? A controlling low over the Labrador Sea pushed cool air across the iceberg-dotted waters onshore; a raw east wind prevailed for three weeks. Then came August…:

Grandma Says: if the first week in August is unusually warm, the coming winter will be snowy and long… Oh boy! It sure was a scorcher, everywhere, including Newfoundland. During the month of August, daytime highs reached 30 degrees,

three times in Gander. The 30year average is 0.23 days.

I don’t want to bog you down with numbers, but I thought the rainfall totals were quite interesting.

And finally, another little gem from Grandma. She used to say, “For every fog in August, there would be a snowfall in the winter.”

I didn’t count them, did you?

Remnants of post-tropical Erin dumped more than a month’s worth of rain in some parts of our region last Thursday. Michael Lewis found more than 4 inches or a little more than 100 mm of rain in his rain gauge. Michael lives about 300 metres south of the Annapolis River in Middleton, N.S.