Although there was tornado mayhem all around the Chateauguay Valley, the area came through Saturday evening’s storms mostly unscathed. The Montérégie, usually covered in orange dots on Hydro-Quebec’s power outage map, was an oasis of calm compared to the Gatineau, Laurentian and Lanaudière regions.
On Saturday, the storm brought only 2.4 mm of rain, with a daytime high of 31.5 degrees Celsius, so it was hot and steamy even without the turbulent conditions. On May 14, the nighttime low was warmer than the normal daytime high for that date. We’ve now had four days in May when the daytime high exceeded 30 degrees Celsius and two more at 29 degrees Celsius.
The average temperature for May, so far, is 14.6 degrees Celsius, now slightly above the normal for the month at 14.3 degrees Celsius and a big jump from last week’s average temperature of 13.7 degrees Celsius.
The midweek rains were timely as the soil at the surface was quite dry, and very little of the planted crops had been able to germinate. The rain brought a flush of green to most of the fields overnight. Total precipitation for the month now stands at 54 mm, with 36 mm coming down in the last week.
The soil temperatures remain a bit of a yo-yo, warming up with the hot weather and cooling down afterwards. At 10 cm of depth, the soil was as warm as 74 degrees Celsius at the beginning of the past week, dropping back down to 59 degrees Celsius by midweek and then back up to 74 degrees Celsius by the end of the week. During the cool midweek period, the ground level temperature dropped to +/- zero and was very close to a frost.
