Record-breaking heat wave in western Canada creates new anomalies
In addition, fires and lightning are rampant in the country.
Forest fires raged across western Canada this week, and hundreds of thousands of lightning bolts lit up the sky — a firestorm that climate scientists and meteorologists have called startling and extreme.
From noon Wednesday through Thursday morning, the North American Lightning Detection Network recorded a total of 710,117 flashes in British Columbia and northwestern Alberta.
Meteorologist Chris Vayaski of Vaisala, a Finnish company that studies weather phenomena around the world, said the amount of lightning recorded in a 15-hour period is almost 5 per cent of the annual average in Canada.
Several factors have created conditions for this phenomenon: a recent record heatwave in the Pacific Northwest, a prolonged drought in western North America, summer storms that developed in northern British Columbia and dozens of wildfires.
A meteorologist explained that fires create their own weather systems. A fire causes the surrounding air to heat strongly, which rises and combines with cooler and wetter air, creating electrically charged clouds over the fire.
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