A Senior Climatologist with Environment Canada says southern Manitoba might have had the best weather this year in all of Canada. David Phillips says that was especially the case in summer when weekends were dry and mosquitoes were nowhere to be found.

Phillips says nation-wide, 2017 will go down as the 8th warmest in 70 years of reporting weather, with temperatures averaging 1.4 degrees above normal. In fact, 2017 marked the 21st consecutive year that was warmer than normal.

According to Environment Canada, worldwide changes in extreme precipitation and temperature are consistent with what we anticipate from global warming. Science is linking climate change with increased risk of forest fires, floods, heavy rains and the most powerful hurricanes. Environment Canada says Canadians experienced many of these extremes in 2017.

Phillips has now come out with his list of Top 10 Weather Stories For 2017. It is as follows:
1. British Columbia's longest and most destructive wildfire season
2. Dry and hot in the west
3. Spring flooding in Quebec and Ontario
4. British Columbia's cold and snowy winter
5. Another Windsor flood: two storms of the century in a year
6. Central Canada's missing summer
7. A new storm of the century (referring to the winter's worst storm stretching across Eastern Canada which struck parts of Ontario on March 13 before moving towards the east into Quebec and Atlantic Canada)
8. Summer in September
9. Newfoundland's Brier blast
10. New Brunswick's glaze storm

Phillips acknowledges that 2017 did not have memorable weather in southern Manitoba, for good or bad reasons. But he says there were a few weather events that were candidates for his Top 10 list. He notes one of the more memorable was the Mackenzie Clipper that brought bitterly cold weather to the Prairies in mid-January, which was then followed by a mid-winter thaw.

There was also the storm in northern Manitoba on March 6th and 7th. Phillips recalls it came from the United States, into eastern Saskatchewan and then hit parts of western Manitoba and up into Flin Flon, Thompson and Churchill, shutting down schools in some communities.

"One person told me they couldn't remember ever schools closed because of weather in Flin Flon and Thompson and that one, it did," he says. "And then of course it was like a moonscape up there in Churchill."

Phillips suggests another top weather story this year in Manitoba ended up being a non-event. He says with 100 centimetres of snow in the Red River Valley during the first 50 days of winter, it appeared flooding was imminent. But with only 30 centimetres of snow the last 100 days of winter, that threat never materialized.