Yellowknife, NWT has been enjoying some of the highest temperatures in the country so far this summer.If you went looking for the highest temperatures in Canada on Monday, you may have had to travel farther than you think.
Although most southern parts of the country were enjoying some warm summer weather, withToronto even under an extreme heat advisory and humidex advisory, the hottest part of the country was apparently up in the Northwest Territories, where several long-standing temperature records were broken.
In Yellowknife, the mercury reached 31.1°C, beating the previous record of 29.4°C from 1955, but temperatures got even higher in Fort Providence, where it reached 32.1°C (beating 29.0°C from 2010), and 33.1°C in Fort Simpson (beating 30.6°C from 1970). For Yellowknife, that apparently also beats the all-time record June temperature, which before this was 30.3°C from June 23rd, 1990, and this wasn't just some one-day fluke. Temperatures in Northwest Territories have been pushing or exceeding 30°C all weekend.
[ Related: How weather, geography made Alberta prime target for flood ]
Given that temperatures in Yellowknife and the surrounding area are typically more like 20°C this time of year, it goes without saying that it being warmer there than it is in southern regions of the country is a little weird, but it's not the only weird thing going on with the weather right now.
The jet stream — the relatively thin 'ribbon' of exceptionally strong winds that flows through the upper atmosphere, and is the driving force for a lot of the big weather systems that we see crossing over North America (and other parts of the world, of course) — has been acting pretty strange lately too... over the past three years, apparently, and in more recent days it's been responsible for not only the extreme heat up north, but it also played a part in the devastating floods in Alberta.
At times the jet stream can be fairly 'quiet', just stretching across the country from west to east and slowly shifting back and forth from north to south, but at other times, it can dip far to the south, dragging cooler temperatures down to the southern United States, and loop far to the north, pulling balmy temperatures along with it. During 'quiet' times, weather systems can zip across the country in a matter of a day or two, but when it dips far south, it can lock weather systems into place for days at a time, just like what happened with the 'omega block' that caused so much rain to fall in Alberta.
