GTA Basks In High Heat While Winter Hangs On Out West
Posted May 20, 2009 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
If the weather in the GTA were a movie, it might just be called “Some Like It Hot.” If you do, you’re going to love the next few days.
A stable high pressure system means the city will be basking in temperatures that will make it feel more like July than May, with highs on Wednesday of 28C and a sticky, humid day on Thursday when readings will soar to 29C – with a humidex of around 34.
Outside of two rare days in late April when we reached 27C, it hasn’t been this warm in Toronto since September 14, 2008, when the thermometer soared to 28.6C.
The other thing you’ll notice is the breeze, with winds from the southwest gusting up to 35 kilometres an hour at times, bringing all that warm air up from the south.
The UV will also be very high over the next few days, with nothing but sunshine at least until next week. And there’s a good chance we could get our first smog alert of the year on Thursday, with deteriorating air quality as the heat bakes in the pollution.
Hot as it is, we won’t break a record on either day. It was 32.2C on May 20, 1962. We reached that same temperature on May 21, 1941.
Things cool down for Friday at 21C, with a terrific weekend shaping up, when readings will be closer to the norm of 20C. There’s no real chance of rain until at least next Monday.
Overnight lows will stay in the low to middle teens right through this incredible stretch.
But even if you don’t like high heat, it has to be better than what’s going on out west. Folks in Edmonton returned to work this week from one of the most miserable Victoria Day weekends in memory.
Temperatures dipped below the freezing mark, and some areas in the central and northern part of that province and northern Saskatchewan are under a heavy snowfall warning. Between 10 and 20 centimetres are possible in some places before things return to normal.
