Wild weather: Q&A with climatologist on 2022 Quebec weather

Violent storms in the Laurentians in May caused damage and left thousands without power. Two landslides entirely wiped out homes and two homes were also struck by lightning in a year that saw a lot of weird weather across Quebec.

CityNews sat down with senior climatologist for Environment Canada, David Phillips, to talk about some of the usual weather seen in 2022.

Were these weather events unusual to you?

It’s a big province. A lot of people, a lot of weather takes you from every direction. And so you can get sometimes hurricanes like Fiona, eastern Quebec, north shore was damaged considerably.

A lot of power outages and states of emergency. But we saw flooding, of course, in many areas. And Montreal a couple of times, big flooding occurred. And we saw it also in the Saguenay flooding that worried a lot of people.

They remembered some of the worst landslides that they’ve seen before and even in the Gatineau River. And of course, you always get those freakish kinds of weather where you get a lightning bolt that comes down and starts fires in the neighbourhood.

And in the end, it was like $23 million of damage. So there is a lot of action when it comes to weather in Quebec. It’s very much part of the nature of the province and where you are and location.

There’s never a dull moment, as they say.

What was the most significant day for weather in Quebec this year? To you, which one would it be?

Well, I think it was on the list of top-10 stories that cover the entire nation. The No. 8 story was Montreal swamped by humongous rain events. In a way, it’s the new flood, the new age flood.

We’ve also had spring flooding in Canada. Too much ice melting and ice jamming and snow melting and rain showers on frozen ground. This is the new flood. This is the urban flood. Not a river flood, but a street flood.

On Sept. 13, wasn’t it just like a sopping wet, juicy kind of thunderstorm came into the city, dropped a month’s worth of rain in two hours, and just flooded basements and leaky roofs. Thousands of Montrealers were inconvenienced greatly.

The cost, in the end, was about $165 million in that two-hour event. And of course, we saw geysers just shooting right up, manhole covers were shot. And of course, a lot of people using the metro system, they were flooded out because some stations had too much water.

So it was really a big event and it even went out to the suburban areas and other areas of Quebec. But it was a lot of rain in a short period of time. And of course, this was very expensive and a nasty flood.

Looking ahead, what can people in Quebec expect for the early months of 2023? Will it be seasonal norms?

Well, we’ve dealt with sort of a tough kind of weather event at the end of the year and in Quebec, as a lot of people have in eastern Canada, and in fact, over North America. But I think that what I see is that, Montreal and Quebec are great winter recreation places.

People go skiing and skating and winter festivals and it’s just how to do it, right? I mean, you are one of the snowiest provinces, but you don’t sort of hibernate and migrate to embrace winter.

So I think the ski resorts are going to be crowded. People are going to be enjoying themselves and forgetting their debts and just loving the great outdoors in Quebec.

And I think you don’t even have to go snowboarding or skiing. You can just go for a long winter’s night in a snowy forest and feel the enjoyment of what winter can bring to Quebecers.