It was a perfect set-up along the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers: Temperatures were below normal for seven straight months — from October 2018 to April 2019 — meaning the ground never experienced the gradual thaw that often comes with spring, nor could it absorb any falling rain. Upstream, the heavy snowpack was unable to thaw, and the region experienced several rounds of heavy rains over five weeks.
Pointe-Gatineau, Que., near the meeting point of the Ottawa and Gatineau rivers, on April 29, 2019. (Albert Leung/CBC)
On May 1, the Ottawa River swelled, breaking the previous record in 2017. More than 6,000 residents were flooded out of their homes in Ottawa and Gatineau, Que., and hundreds more from Pembroke, Ont. to Sherbrooke, Que. not to mention the flooding of precious farmland. As a result, two people died.
Post-tropical storm Erin was the first to reach Canadian shores, on Aug. 29. It triggered flash flooding, though it was a bit of a blessing to farmers who had endured a dry summer until then.
A crane on South Park St. in Halifax toppled onto a building under construction after Hurricane Dorian made landfall in Nova Scotia. (Craig Paisley/CBC)
But it was Dorian that will be most remembered. The powerful Category 5 hurricane produced winds of 300 km/h over the Bahamas and lingered, almost at a standstill, for 24 hours. Eventually, it made its way to Nova Scotia, transitioning to a post-tropical storm with winds of 155 km/h. It knocked out power to nearly half a million people across Atlantic Canada. The Insurance Board of Canada estimated that Dorian caused $140 million to insured property, with most of it in Nova Scotia.
3. (S)no-good Prairie fall
The West is no stranger to early snowfalls, but 2019 turned out to be a dinger. At the end of September, Calgary experienced a harsh, early, snowy surprise. Over four days, 32 cm fell in the city, the greatest depth of snow left on the ground in 65 years.
City crews in Winnipeg tackle a downed tree following a spring snowstorm. (Austin Grabish/CBC)
Southern B.C. wasn’t left out of the snowy mess; 35 to 50 cm of snow was dumped across many mountain passes. And a few weeks later, it was Manitoba’s turn. From Brandon to Winnipeg, snow blanketed the area. States of emergency were declared in 11 communities and more than 6,000 people were evacuated from First Nations communities.
4. A brutal FFFFebruary in Canada
February is often thought of as the harshest month of winter, and 2019 certainly lived up to that expectation.
Though the planet was experiencing an El Niño event — a warming in a region of the Pacific that typically brings milder weather to parts of Canada — the Arctic air took an icy grip on the country and wouldn’t let go.
A person walks a dog as heavy snow falls in Vancouver. (Darryl Dyck/Canadian Press)
In B.C., along the coast, reaching into the Interior, it was 9 C below normal. In Calgary, February was the coldest month in 83 years. And southern Alberta could just forget about the Chinook: in 2019 it was 14 C colder than normal in the region.
Meanwhile, Toronto received a year’s worth of snow in January and February alone. And Atlantic Canada? The region experienced its coldest February in 25 years.
5. Record heat continues in Arctic
Unfortunately, nothing changed in the Arctic.
Once again, 2019 proved to be another record warm year. In September, the Arctic sea ice reached its yearly minimum at 4.15 million square km, the second-lowest on record, tied with 2007 and 2016.
The community of Apex is seen from Iqaluit on Friday, Aug. 2. Once again, the Arctic continued to warm during 2019. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)
“The North is the most important story,” Phillips said. “It will be the most important story of the century.”
And it wasn’t just the climate — it was the weather itself, he said.
While weather may just be an inconvenience to most people, for farmers it can mean the difference between putting food on the table or not.
And in the Prairies, farmers had to deal with some truly inconsistent weather in 2019.
Even before the growing season began, farmers struggled with some of the driest conditions since record-keeping began 133 years ago. Edmonton had its driest spring on record, Regina had its driest March and Winnipeg its driest first half of the year with a measly 91 mm of precipitation (its average is 235 mm from January to June).
But once the rains started, they didn’t stop.
Weather played havoc with farmers in the Prairies during the spring 2019, with many losing crops. (Dave Gilson/CBC)
Edmonton recorded 55 days of rain through June to August, tying for the most number of days since 1881. And it wasn’t just the rain: Alberta and Saskatchewan had an early, mid-September snowfall with more of the same — including rain — in October. As a result, many farmers lost large amounts of their crops.
7. How the Grinch stole…Halloween?
Sadly, instead of a treat, many children this Halloween received a nasty trick.
Unfortunately, for kids in the East, it was donning a snowsuit, carrying an umbrella or, well, no Halloween at all.
It was wet and windy in southern Ontario: the town of Stratford received the most with 109 mm of rain. In Port Colborne, winds topped 129 km/h.
Halloween played a wet and windy trick on many children in Canada’s east in 2019. (Ivanoh Demers/Radio-Canada)
Meanwhile, in Chibougamau, Que., 30 cm of snow fell. And there was snow and rain across Newfoundland.
Spring means longer days, the sight of green grass, budding trees and warmer weather. But that just wasn’t the case in much of Canada in 2019. And once again, it was the dreaded Polar Vortex who squelched our fun.
Across the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Basin, it was the coldest spring in 22 years. By the end of May, less than five per cent of Ontario farmers’ crops had been planted.
Terry Ferguson, right, gets help from friend Peter McMaster to stack sandbags around his Bay Street home in an attempt to keep out the flood waters of the St. John River in Saint John, N.B., on Wednesday, April 24, 2019. (Stephen MacGillivray/Canadian Press)
In April, the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia had endured almost triple the month’s rainfall with some of the coldest soil temperatures in two decades.
In New Brunswick, Moncton’s average May temperature was almost three degrees colder than average. And once again, farmers felt the crunch across the region.
At the New Brunswick-Maine border, the river had its largest stream flow in 67 years. In Fredericton, the river reached its peak at 8.37 metres, breaking 2018’s record, and coming in second highest after 1973.
Spring flowers had a tough job ahead of them as cold weather descended across the east, stretching into Atlantic Canada. (CBC)
It was particularly difficult for residents as they desperately tried to protect their property. Canada’s military was eventually called in to assist after 1,500 people were evacuated. Ultimately, 16,000 homes and buildings were damaged by floodwaters with 145 roads were shut down.
And while the province is no stranger to floods, Phillips points out that the last two floods — both the 2018 and 2019 ones — were considered to be once-in-a-hundred-year floods. However, the past year saw less of an impact than the year previous.
“There are lessons to be learned from some of these [stories], too, that we realize that the 100-year storm is becoming the 10-year storm,” Phillips said. “So we need to do things differently. We just can’t sit there and [say] ‘Oh,well Mother Nature is going to get us.’ We need to do something about it.”
10. Fewer fires, more burning
After an intense fire season in 2018, it was a fairly quiet fire season in 2019, with fires down 40 per cent across the country.
Roughly 422,000 lightning strikes were recorded in B.C. — which experienced its worst season in history in 2018 — far surpassing the average of 266,000. But the good thing is, it was accompanied by wet weather.
Though there were fewer fires than in 2018, the 2019 season was still a memorable one for Alberta and Ontario. (Ben Nelms/CBC)
But it was Alberta that broke from the trend, where fires consumed an area roughly 14 times that of the average. It was the second-worst season on record. By the end of May, 10,000 people had been evacuated from their homes.
Ontario also experienced severe forest fires. In northwestern Ontario, forest fires caused poor air quality in several First Nation communities for almost two weeks, resulting in 2,500 residents being evacuated.
In the end
Phillips said there’s a message to be taken away from these weather events.
“There’s no region that I would say had the worst weather,” said Phillips. “It’s not new weather, though … it’s the same old weather that our grandparents talked about, but it’s just that the statistics are different: the frequency, the intensity, the out of season, out of place, anything like that that just seems to make it different than it was.”
And he reminds Canadians: “Mother Nature holds all the trump cards.”
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
