The word for April is “wet!” The first half of the month has seen the Valley drenched with 98 millimetres of precipitation, 53 mm in the first week and 45 mm in the second one. That’s 15 per cent more moisture than the average for the whole month, and we’ve still two weeks to go.
The tile drains, culverts, and creeks have all been pouring muddy-coloured water into the Chateauguay River, the level of which is as close to the Huntingdon bridge as it was when the ice melted at the end of the winter. To no one’s surprise, rain was recorded during 11 of the 16 days in April.
And when it wasn’t raining, there was a windstorm on Easter Friday which brought down a lot of branches and a few trees throughout the Valley, with lots of power outages in the eastern sector. Much stronger than the forecast, the gusts reached 77 kilometres per hour as recorded at the Environment Canada weather station in Saint-Anicet.
Another surprise is the average temperature, which now sits at 6.3 degrees Celsius, which is a big jump from the 5 C for the first week of the month, and very close to the normal for April of 6.5 C. Although the damp and windy days haven’t seemed warm, the increase in average temperature is mainly due to warmer nights which have been consistently above average for the entire month.
