An Alberta city just shattered a 123-year-old weather record

A weather system that brought plenty of rain to parts of Alberta this week also helped one city break a 120+-year-old record.

Daily Hive spoke with Terri Lange, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), who dished on which city in the province had its weather history books rewritten on Tuesday.

“Medicine Hat had a hefty, good rain. It had a one-day total of 73.2 mm yesterday, breaking the old one-day rainfall amount for the month of May record.”

Lange added that the rainfall total broke the old record by a “fair shot.” The old record was set on May 3, 1901, when 40.1 mm of rain fell in a single day.

The system that dumped heavy rain on Medicine Hat also brought plenty of water to other parts of Alberta. ECCC issued a weather summary Wednesday morning detailing the amounts observed.

Alberta weather record

Environment and Climate Change Canada

Speaking of all this rain, we got curious about how May Long weekend is shaping up for the province — and according to Lange, it’s too early to tell.

“There’s no consensus by the models, we don’t really know what’s going to be going on, there’s no confidence,” Lange said.

“One model has a big ridge of high pressure and looks warm and dry, but two other ones have big low pressure with lots of rain. The atmosphere doesn’t quite know yet. Seven days out, there’s not bad confidence, but beyond that, the confidence falls off a cliff.”

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