Meteorological seasons are how we divide the year into four parts based on the temperature and weather. Each season lasts for three months, making it easier to keep track of the weather and compare it to other years. It breaks down like this

• Winter: December, January and February
• Spring: March, April and May
• Summer: June, July and August
• Fall: September, October and November

The date this post was written was September 3, 2024 which means Meteorological summer has come and gone and we are into fall. The beautiful thing about that is we can now look back at the data from the summer and draw some conclusions about how it stacks up to previous years.

Rodney Barney, a meteorologist with the Environment and Climate Change Canada Weather Office in Gander, did some calculations and found a litany of locations recorded their warmest summer on record, including St. John’s!

One of the interesting things about this data is many of the new records broke the record that was set back in 2022. When it comes to weather, we cannot tie every single event to climate change and our warming planet. Extremes have always and will always be part of weather, what is increasing is the frequency of these extremes, and this is a great example of that.