Rank |
Smoke
hours |
Smoke
days |
‘Metar’
smoke days* |
Rank |
|||
1 |
369 |
1961 |
|
|
|
|
1 |
2 |
276 |
1955 |
|
|
|
|
2 |
3 |
265 |
2021 |
|
|
|
|
3 |
4 |
253 |
1953 |
|
|
|
|
4 |
5 |
232 |
1956 |
|
|
|
|
5 |
6 |
215 |
1959 |
|
|
|
|
6 |
7 |
189 |
1962 |
|
|
|
|
7 |
8 |
181 |
1954 |
|
|
|
|
8 |
9 |
179 |
1958 |
|
|
|
|
9 |
10 |
130 |
1960 |
|
|
|
|
10 |
DEFINITIONS:
Smoke hours = Number of hours of smoke reported in the ECCC Climate Archives hourly data.
Smoke days = Number of days with smoke reported in the ECCC Climate Archives hourly data.
'Metar' smoke days = Number of days with smoke reported anywhere in metar/airway reports, be it the main condition or in the remarks, along with ANY reduction in visibilty. Note that 'Haze/HZ' is not considered as smoke.
Graphs:
The two following graphs show that smoke is occurring increasingly during the summer and less so in other seasons. Winter smoke is almost non-existent now, whereas it was ubiquitous in the 1950s-1970s.
The following two wind roses show the proportion of smoke hours that occurred with each wind direction. The first wind rose looks at all smoke hours from 1953 to July 2021. The second wind rose compares the wind directions during smoke in the 1990s-2021 compared to 1953-1979. What we see is there was a bias toward southeasterly wind directions during smoke in the 1950s-1970s. This suggests that a lot of the smoke was due to urban activities in Winnipeg (SE wind comes off the city to the Airport). This explains a lot of the cold season smoke seen back then. Today, wind direction during smoke is more closely tied to the climitological wind direction frequencies, suggesting little influence by wind direction. Smoke can come from anywhere. However, there is a very slight bias toward easterly and northerly winds, suggesting that possibly MB and NW ON fires more commonly bring smoke into Winnipeg than other sources.