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The mercury has surpassed 20 C for the first time this year in Ottawa.
After the temperature reached 21 C at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Environment Canada’s forecast calls for highs of 22 C on Wednesday and Thursday, plus periods of cloud and rain into Thursday and showers expected on Friday.
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While the forecast calls for a three-day stretch of unseasonably warm temperatures, we aren’t expected to break any records.
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The record for warmest temperature on April 9 was 23.5 C, set in 2021, Peter Kimbell, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, said in an interview Tuesday.
He noted the average daytime high was around 10 C for this time of year, but “we’re looking at two or three days of warmer than average weather.”
He noted Ottawa had comparable stretches of warm April days in 2021 and 2023. This year, though, “we won’t be breaking any records,” he said. “But we’ll be well above average.”
The record high temperature for April 10 was 25.6 in 1945. Similarly, the record high for April 11 was 26.1 C, also in 1945, Kimbell said.
This year’s spate of unseasonably warm temperatures, Kimbell said, has been brought on by a low-pressure system bringing warm air from Texas and tracking across Ontario’s Great Lakes region, “ushering in a warm air mass” to southern and eastern Ontario.
Rain is in the forecast for Thursday night, and after that the forecast calls for more seasonally expected weather, including a high of 15 C on Friday and 7 C on Saturday.
“It will be a bit of a roller-coaster, which is not abnormal for April, low-pressure systems that bring in some warm weather,” Kimbell said. “But then we bounce back to something closer to normal.”
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