TORONTO - The big Arctic melt of 2007 which shocked scientists and served as an environmental wake-up call for the planet is the top weather story of the decade, if not the past 100 years, says one of Canada's leading climatologists.
The Canadian Press asked Environment Canada senior climatologist David Phillips to comb through his 100 top weather news stories since 2000 and rank the country's Top 10.
While Western Canada dominated the list with floods, fires, drought, record temperatures and a deadly tornado it was the dramatic melting of the polar ice cap that captured the top spot.
"Certainly for me it may be the story of the century, as opposed to just the story of the decade, because the implications of that particular kind of event are unknown," Phillips said.
Satellite images revealed Arctic sea ice had shrunk to 4.28 million square km in 2007. That was 39 per cent below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000 -- a minimum not seen for possibly more than a century, he said.
"When you look at that event, in many ways, it was absolutely shocking to scientists," said Phillips. "It was almost like an environmental surprise, the fact that the ice just disappeared. It seemed overnight."
While the ice had been thinning for decades, the big loss "raised a consciousness around the world that this dramatic event was happening," he added.
Arctic sea ice was at its third lowest level in three decades this past year, earning it the No. 6 spot on Phillips' top weather stories of 2009, released Wednesday. The top weather story of 2009 is what Phillips billed the "Summer of Our Discontent" -- the "bummer of a summer" in which there was too much heat in the West and "not enough for all the rest."
Like his annual lists for the past 14 years, his decade list was determined by the impact of the events, the area affected, economic effects and how long events were top news stories.
Almost all the decade stories were summer stories and the West's dominance could be due to climate change or just bad luck, he said.
B.C.'s extremes of fires, floods and freezes in 2003 is No. 2 on the decade list. That summer, 2,500 forest fires charred 2,650 square km of land -- 11 times the annual average area over the last 10 years. There were mass evacuations, 40 degree temperatures in the Interior, followed by record rains and floods in autumn, and record-freezing temperatures in November in Victoria and Vancouver.
The "Prairie Plagues" of 2002 are No. 3 of the decade. Western Canada farmers faced one of their worst growing seasons, with drought, searing heat, grasshoppers, pestilence and mid-summer snow and frost, topped off by late and heavy harvest rains.
B.C. takes the fourth spot with its 2006 weather woes, which included a wicked November during which the coast was hit often and hard with drenching rains, strong winds and high tides.
Flooding of southern Alberta towns that forced thousands to evacuate in 2005 is No. 5. About 40 municipalities had infrastructure damage and 14 declared official states of emergency.
This year's top story, the "Summer of Discontent," comes in at No. 6 for the decade.
Hot, dry conditions sparked the most expensive wildfire-fighting season on record in B.C. -- almost $400 million to fight the blazes -- and hundreds of daily maximum temperatures were eclipsed.
But "everybody from Calgary to Corner Brook" had to wait until September to see summer, Phillips said.
It was the wettest summer ever in Atlantic Canada and uncomfortably cold in central Canada, where it rained hard and often. It was among the 10 coolest summers ever on the eastern Prairies with frost warnings issued every month. The high Arctic had its warmest summer -- 1.8 degrees above normal.
Theories abounded to explain the "summer that wasn't," he said.
"Was it because of the quiet sun or maybe it was ozone holes or was it something Spanish sounding like El Nino or La Nina or was it global cooling or even divine intervention?" he said about the speculation.
The real culprit was a drop-down jet stream that normally moves west to east across the Territories but instead sank south along the U.S.-Canada border, ushering in waves of Canadian air.
No. 7 on the decade list was the East's big summer soak in 2008, when Canadians from Ontario to Newfoundland complained about the almost daily rain, which ruined crops for many Eastern Canadian growers.
A spectacular storm dumped more than 150 mm of rain in Edmonton in less than an hour in 2004, likely making it the wettest moment in the city's history and No. 8.
That kind of storm, a Texas Gullywasher, which floods basements and wrecks roads, has been an increasing trend and caused big insurance losses over the past decade, said Phillips.
"Our infrastructure may very well have been designed for cities or urban areas 20 or 30 years ago, but they're not able to withstand the kind of new storm, the more enhanced kind of storm we see now," he said.
Rounding out the top 10 are the drought of 2001 in which Western growing conditions were the worst since 1988 and southern Canada's driest in 34 years -- and the 2000 tornado at the Green Acres campground near Red Deer, Alta., that killed 12 and injured 140.