Thunder Bay on track to break warmest November record: Environment Canada

The run of warm days and nights in Thunder Bay, Ont. may end up leading to a new record for the warmest November, says a meteorologist with Environment Canada.

Currently, the city's average temperature for the month is about 6 C, according to Geoff Coulson, a meterologist with the weather service. The current record was set in November, 2009 with an average temperature of 2.5 C.

"We're on a record-breaking pace right now for the warmest November ever in Thunder Bay," he said. "We may still, in fact, attain that record even with temperatures cooling off a bit."

• Warm weather here for a while, says Environment Canada

Coulson said the thermometer is expected to drop down to around the freezing mark as we get close to the weekend, with snow in the forecast Friday night into Saturday morning.

That Thunder Bay, and the northwest, have been as warm as they have is very unusual, he said.

"Normally the fall is a transition season, we would expect to see a few mild days here and there," he said.

"But we'd also expect to see some days where those first Arctic air masses would be coming down by this point ... we would expect to have had a few notable snow falls across northwestern Ontario."

That hasn't happened due to stable weather pattens south of the border, Coulson said.

"A large area of high pressure stalled out over the American midwest, acting not only to bring up the much warmer-than-normal air that we've been experiencing, but also acting to deflect a lot of notable weather systems."

On Sunday, three communities in the northwest — Kenora, Dryden and Fort Frances — all set single-day records for warmest temperature, Coulson said.

Thunder Bay's high on Sunday of 15.8 C wasn't enough to put it in the record books, but Coulson added that the city saw three single-day records set last week — on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.