Week-long heatwave to have lasting impact in Alberta, B.C.

CALGARY — A relatively short, one-week heatwave is coming to an end, but its effects on Western Canadians will last for months, not just ecologically, but also personal well being and mental health.

The obvious concern is what this will do for wildfire season since hot, dry weather tends to cascade into more hot, dry weather.

But the blazing heat also took a big chunk out of the mountain snowpack.

“It’s set up to be a (potentially high) water-stressed August and September, so you might want to think about already, in addition to campfire bans, already putting in some water management strategies,” said Shawn Marshall, a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Calgary.

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It also sets up a big year for glacier melt.

“It’s a big impact when they lose their winter snowpack really quickly. Once you get down to the bare glacier ice that’s underneath the snow, it’s really dark, it absorbs maybe three times more sunlight than the snow that sits on top so by getting down to that bare ice right now in parts of the Rockies a couple of weeks ahead of schedule, that’s going hammer the glaciers this summer,” he said.

What’s less clear is what this could mean for agriculture since some crops could thrive in drier conditions.

“Maybe it’s going to be a decent, even a rich wine year for parts of B.C., but that depends if things have burned and shrivelled up on the vines through these past couple of weeks,” Marshall said. “There might be a lot of crop stress from this, it depends if we bounce back and get some rain in the next couple weeks.”

A lot of it depends on what weather comes in July, but with people dying from the heat and homes burning, this one week of extreme heat will impact some for a lot longer than just this summer.

“This can scar and damage people for a long time so I think we’re just beginning to see what some of these long term physical and mental impacts would be on top of everything we’ve just gone through with COVID.”