Precipitation Trends for All Canada

You cannot add together the precipitation from different locations, you cannot even average them together because different geographical areas get different amounts depending on the topography and proximity to lakes. For example, the area west of the Niagara Escarpment gets more snow and rain because of winds off Lake Huron. Streamers can dump as much as 2 feet of snow in one run in this area, while Toronto gets nothing. Thus the deposit of snow and rain has local factors involved in initiation of precipitation and has nothing to do with global temperatures.

That said, we will look at stations with at least 80 years of data to see if there is any change in precipitation.

British Columbia:
FORT ST JAMES



VAVENBY



Central Canada:
Calgary Airport. Though it has the longest temperature record for Alberta, its precipitation data ends in 1988.




MUENSTER, Sask



Birtle, MN




Southern Ontario:
Belleville:



Southern Quebec:
BROME



East Coast:
Cartwright, NFD



Over All Average:
This is averaging all stations beyond those above, including stations with short datasets:


It is clear from this average of all stations, that over all in Canada there is nothing unusual in the precipitation. As noted above, however, one cannot put too much credence on this graph because not all stations are represented in all years. In fact, the number of stations per year with precipitation data looks like this:


This means that in the early and recent years, the average of the precipitations will be skewed by the geographical and regional differences in those stations. Thus the average for all Canada is unreliable for determining trends.

All these show is changes over time. There is nothing to link this with AGW or CO2 emissions. It's just normal random long term changes that would happen whether we emitted CO2 or not.

The next post on precipitation will look at the rain and show fall for the various months to see if there are seasonal shifts.