Montreal winters got about a third less snow at the turn of the millennium than in the mid-19th century, according to an analysis of decades of meteorological data compiled by McGill University.
“We realize that we’re more obsessed with snow today than we used to be, even though there used to be more snow, precisely because it was usual for there to be more,” said Frédéric Fabry, head of McGill’s Bieler School of the Environment.
“On the other hand, flooding is just as catastrophic.”
The McGill Meteorological Observatory is the oldest in Quebec and the second oldest in Canada. Founded in 1863, all the data recorded there until 1992 was done by hand, often several times a day, in large notebooks resembling accounting books.
The SAM (weather archive rescue) project was set up in 2018, led by McGill’s Victoria Slonosky, to make use of the wealth of data.
The aim of the project is to digitize information to facilitate …