93 in NYT Canada

[Mitchel Volk]

See the latest Unysis Map it has 93 in parts of the Northwest Territory Canada.

[roardog]

Makes sense with the near record cold here in the midwest/great lakes.

[bowtie`]

Can you imagine what the biting flies and mosquitos are like up there when it gets to those temps? Unbelievably bad.

[Roger Smith]

I was once on a wilderness canoe trip in the NWT (original poster, NYT is the New York Times to us). This was in the region west of YFS (Fort Simpson) and the normal daytime high there in July is about 80 F. Highs into the low 90s are not uncommon in the Mackenzie valley and extreme highs are probably around 96-98 F. On our trip, the highs ranged from the mid-80s to a very cool 50 F on July 31, 1974. This is really the only difference between the NWT summer climate and say Alberta or even higher parts of the Pac NW. You can get a real arctic air mass once or twice a month and it feels like mid-October. With the very short nights, it only drops a few degrees after sunset in early July but near the end of the month you can get a slight frost in some situations.

 

The bugs are really ferocious and you need full mosquito netting for camping, even a lunch stop is difficult, but we quickly learned that islands in the middle of a river get a nice bug-dispersing breeze plus, if there is no vegetation on them, very few bugs. So we took to eating our lunches on such islands and for camping, we found that right down by the water was a good place to sit until time to run for the tents. The bugs tend to go dormant for a few hours around sunrise, I guess they need their rest.

 

The other somewhat unexpected feature of the local climate in summer is that there are very frequent thunderstorms, especially in the mountains west of the Mackenzie River. I would say that we had thunder almost every day on the trip (five weeks) and one event shortly after the cold day when a closed low formed and dropped over four inches of rain in two days. This brought up all the "side creeks" to flood stage which meant instead of foot-wide trickles in a gravelly delta they became half-mile-wide torrents, and the main river which is the South Nahanni rose about four or five feet overnight. It then stayed at that height for a day or two and gradually returned to its usual levels. It is also really freaky to see the summer full moon hanging just over the southern horizon at midnight. Sort of the reverse of the midwinter three hours of daylight that this region (at 62-63 N) gets.

 

From what I've read, the river tends to run unfrozen to about mid-November despite the onset of (by Midwest U.S. standards) winter in late September or early October. Then it freezes solid except where it's running through rapids until May or early June. Some lakes on the other side of the Mackenzie valley stay frozen to late June or early July. But even over on that side the temperatures get up above 90 F the odd time. I think the all-time record high at Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island is something like 80 F.

[tamarack]

June 27, 1915 - Fort Yukon, Alaska: 100F (the state record.)  Not common, but heat isn't unknown.