Mike W. Bryant
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Sep 10/01) - While it's still anyone's guess when the first real grip of winter's chill will descend on the North, several things are already clear about this summer's weather.

The first thing that has become clear is how cloudy it's been, Environment Canada says. At the same time, a few places in the Mackenzie Valley and Delta topped out in July with some record hot temperatures, meteorologist Yvonne Bilan-Wallace said in an interview from the climate centre in Edmonton.

Another thing that is clear, she says, is how different the beginning and the end of summer have been.

According to Bilan-Wallace, this year's summer in the Northwest Territories began warm and dry, yet is ending on a bit of a soggy note.

"It was a rainy, dull month," Bilan-Wallace says of the weather last month. "The eighth wettest in 60 years of records."

Bilan-Wallace says much of the wet weather that occurred later on into summer was likely the result of shifting patterns within the jet stream. In August, the jet stream -- a river of air that runs at more than 60,000 feet in altitude from west-to-east across North America, was flowing farther north, dragging cloud cover up here that had been formed over Pacific Ocean low pressure systems off the west coast. The same phenomena left much of southern Canada clear and parched.

While Bilan-Wallace says the overall weather in the Territories this summer was not particularly remarkable, some areas did peak her interest. "Norman Wells got quite warm July 20," says Bilan-Wallace. "It was 32.2 degrees celsius, which was a record for that day."

Inuvik also experienced some record temperatures this summer. The town experienced a record high on two days -- 32.8 degrees on the same day as Norman Well's record, and another high of 31.4 degrees on July 22.

The most interesting weather phenomenon Bilan-Wallace says she encountered was the tornado sighting on the Mackenzie Delta in July.

"To me that was a really interesting event," says Bilan-Wallace. "I suspect that there was even more than that."

She says that due to the North's remoteness and sparse population, a lot of the stranger weather goes unnoticed.

Hay River's golf course manager Wayne Korotash says that for the most part, this summer's weather was no detriment to golfers trying to make it onto the links.

"It was a pretty mild summer," says Korotash. "I didn't see much rain until August."

He says if there was any problem with the weather, it was the lack of rain.

"The fairways were pretty dry and turning a little hard," Korotash explains. "We were a little behind the eight ball. By the time we got our irrigation system up and running, it was beginning to rain."

On the other hand, Ken Dalton, base manager for Aklak Air in Inuvik, says he would have liked to have seen a little more sunshine this summer.

"People told me it wasn't strange to have 30 degree temperatures up here in the summer time," says Dalton, who had just spent his first summer up North.

"We had about a week of that, so I'm not impressed."