47.9 degrees Celsius in Canada: a historic heatwave suffocates the northwest of the country and the United States

COVID-19 schools and clinics closed and Olympic Games qualifying athletics event postponed: Western Canada and sections of the United States suffered on Monday historical temperature records, caused by an unusually intense heat wave.

In Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington, two large cities in the northwestern United States known for their typically cold and humid climates, temperatures have reached its highest level since we have records (1940).

It reached 46.1 degrees Celsius at the Portland airport on Monday at noon (after a record 44.4 degrees the day before) and 41.6 degrees in Seattle, according to the US Meteorological Service (NWS).

But western Canada took the crown and the town of Lytton, BC, broke the country’s record, with a temperature of 47.9 degrees Celsius on Monday.

Several COVID-19 vaccination clinics have been closed and schools have announced the suspension of activities due to the sweltering heat.

“A prolonged, dangerous and historic heatwave will persist for all this week“Environment Canada has cautioned, issuing alerts for British Columbia, Alberta and parts of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories.

“It’s a desert heat, very dry and very hot,” David Phillips, senior climatologist at Environment Canada, told AFP.

“We are the second coldest and snowiest country in the world,” he said. “We often see cold spells and blizzards, but we rarely talk about hot weather like this… Dubai would be cooler than what we are seeing now.”

“Extremely dangerous”

Across the border, Americans are also experiencing sweltering temperatures in the northwestern states. “This level of heat is extremely dangerous,” the NWS warned on Monday.

A Seattle market, the Ballard Farmers Market, had to close early, probably for the first time “because of the heat,” he told AFP your manager, Doug Farr. “Most of the time it’s because of the snow.

On Monday, Amazon announced that it was opening part of its Seattle headquarters to the public as a 1,000-seat refreshment point. Many houses lack air conditioning in this typically temperate town.

The average temperature for June in Seattle is 19 degrees Celsius.

“At 21 degrees, it’s a good day, everyone goes out in shorts and t-shirts, but it is getting absurd,” said a Seattle resident interviewed by AFP, claiming to feel “as if I was in the desert”.

Also in Portland, many residents took refuge with mattresses and folding chairs in makeshift air-conditioned places by local authorities.

Not far from there, in the city of Eugene, the last of the athletics events of the American teams for the Olympics had to be postponed Sunday due to the heatwave.

Extreme heat, combined with an intense drought in the American West, caused several fires over the weekend. One of them, on the Oregon-California border, burned about 600 hectares Monday morning, forcing authorities to evacuate some residents and close a national highway.

“Every thousand years”

The heatwave is due to a phenomenon known as the “heat dome”: the high pressures trap the hot air in the region.

The intensity of this “heat dome” is “so statistically rare that it could only be expected once every several thousand years on average,” the Washington Post weather experts wrote. “But human-induced climate change has made these kinds of rare events more likely.”

According to Nick Bond, climatologist at the University of Washington, climate change is certainly a factor, but “secondary”.

“The main element is this very unusual weather pattern” of the heating dome, he told AFP. Having said that, “climate change is real, our temperatures have warmed up here” which “made this episode of heat even more severe”.

(With information from AFP)

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