June 2021 Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Thread

Thanks. And the 49.6°C happened the day before the fire so that wouldn't have affected it.

If what jetshnl says is true, there are two questions:

1. Which of the two readings is accurate because they can't both be right (they could both be wrong, but that's a whole other story)?

2. Why do ECCC have different coordinates for the two stations if they're in the same compound?

That's a good idea although with possible damage to the stations the quality control processes may never be completed. But at least the locations could be clarified.

To muddy the waters further, there's this information I stumbled upon:


Source: globalnews.ca/news/7991383/lytton-bc-new-all-time-canadian-heat-record-third-day/

Now I think the journo is referring to the fact that when you use the ECCC website to find current conditions for Lytton, you're sent to the conditions for the NavCan site CWLY. This is the site that averaged about 0.8°C cooler. The journo probably thinks it's the official site because it's where you're lead to even though ECCC does not actually consider NavCan sites official at all! (Why they use an unofficial site for their current conditions is a real mystery). Anyway, the journo hints that CWLY (which he thinks is official) is indeed in a separate location "under some trees". This is consistent with it being 1.5km away on the middle of nowhere (although the altitude discrepancy remains).

So, yes, ECCC do have a lot of questions to answer.

Not to be too self-referential, but now that I think about it the above is ridiculous because a weather station "tucked away under some trees" violates every standard known to man and would give ridiculous results. More likely than not, the journo has no idea what their talking about and should be ignored completely.

Back to square one.

Not too often northern Manitoba is the hottest region of the province.

After looking into things in more detail I've come to the conclusion that the coordinates of the NavCan stations (listed here) are actually those of the associated airfield; they are thus not helpful to pinpoint the exact location of the weather station. For example, the coordinates for the YVR station place it directly inside the "Joe and the Juice Takeout" within the C concourse of the Air Canada terminal!

So in the case of Lytton all the other available information (thanks jetshnl ) indicates that the two Lytton stations (CVLY and CWLY) are (or were) colocated here:


We are thus left with the question as to why the ECCC site CVLY was 49.6°C when the NavCan CWLY site was only 48.6°C? More generally, why has CVLY been consistently warmer (by almost a full degree celsius) over the course of June than CWLY when the two stations are only meters away from each other? Something doesn't add up.

Looking back through the historical data there does appear to be a discontinuity that develops between the two sites sometime in 2018. Eyeballing it, I cannot tell if it's statistically significant and, if so, whether it's CVLY getting too hot or CWLY getting too cold. If I have time I'll try and do some statistical tests.

Bottom line is, it was still extremely hot--at least 48.6°C--but I'm less confident in the 49.6°C than I was 48 hours ago.

Just for a fun post of the screenshot I took on last Tuesday. Clearly it's an error as nowhere around the area caught on the radar. Did someone throw their water bottle toward the station or turned on sprinkler with maximum pressure? lol

🖕🏿Mörön🖕🏿 I think that app is kinda liberal in what it calls drizzle. For example it might be mostly sunny, but the radar could be picking up some tiny green specks of precip that aren't even reaching the ground, and it will still report that as "drizzle."