Cindy Day's year-end weather review

For SaltWire Network Chief Meteorologist Cindy Day, the weather story that had the greatest impact in 2019 was that climate change and widespread awareness of it became evident.

"I feel that the biggest weather story across all the country, but certainly Atlantic Canada as well, is sort of not a weather event itself, but just our climate awakening," Day says.

"I think people in the past year have really stopped to re-think what we're doing to the planet, and maybe Greta (Thunberg) has had a lot to do with that. She has people around the world taking note,” Day says. “But, I think that climate awakening, the fact that Canada is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, all these things I think make the climate our number one story."

One of the ways that climate change can be seen in our weather patterns is the intensity and frequency of winds, says Day. Hurricane Dorian caused absolute devastation in the Bahamas before tracking north and hitting Nova Scotia on Sept. 7, leaving widespread power outages and damage.

"In the past few years, we've seen a lot of our storms, not necessarily tropical or hurricane storms, but a lot of our storms intensify to bring us a lot of wind," Day adds.

Day says the weather we are experiencing now is very different from the weather that's been coming through in the past 50 or 60 years.

"The impact, the wind component, the drop in pressure is dramatic," she says. "When we have tidal scenarios along the coast, the swings from the high to low are more impressive, more dramatic than they have been because of the combination of the strong storm surge.

“I think over the next 20 to 30 years, we're going to see significant impact if not devastating impact as climate continues to change."

And strong winds come through the region with a number of weather systems.

Day has been hearing anecdotes everywhere she goes about how the weather is different now from what it used to be years ago.

"People talk about the weather and almost in the same breath, they say 'it never was like this before.' We really are seeing changes to our climate," she says. " 20 years ago, people didn't say that. They'd talk about a storm and that'd be the end of it. But now they're sort of connecting it to the fact that yes, we are creating change that is not good and here's how we're seeing it unfold now… people are making that connection between weather and climate and that is very important."