How the remnants of post-tropical storm Hilary will affect Canada

By Sissi De Flaviis, CTVNews.ca Writer

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    Toronto, Ontario (CTV Network) — The remnants of Hilary, the first tropical storm to hit Southern California in 84 years, are making their way further north and are expected to affect Canada’s western region this week.

“It’s going to move its way northward and drive significant rain in southern Alberta and parts of Saskatchewan, and even into central Manitoba,” CTV Your Morning’s chief meteorologist Kelsey McEwen said Monday.

According to Environment Canada’s weather tracker, showers are likely throughout Monday for southern Alberta stretching as far up north as Red Deer.

The central part of Saskatchewan is expected to see some rain until Thursday, with a risk of thunderstorms on Tuesday morning averaging a rainfall amount between five and 10 millimetres.

The southeastern parts of B.C. should also expect some showers between Monday and Wednesday.

Kamloops and West Kelowna, which are among the many areas in B.C. dealing with active wildfires, are expected to get some light rain starting tonight. Slightly northern areas like Quesnel and Williams Lake are at risk of thunderstorms starting on Tuesday afternoon.

McEwen said the storm’s impacts will be felt into Tuesday evening in some of the affected areas.

Hilary first made landfall on Sunday in the arid Baja California peninsula on Sunday, where one person drowned. Then, it drenched some areas of the southern U.S. like Palm Springs as it dropped more than half an average year’s worth of rain by Sunday evening.

The National Hurricane Centre in Miami downgraded Hilary to a post-tropical cyclone in its Monday advisory, but still warned ongoing “life-threatening” flooding should be expected in parts of the U.S. until Tuesday.

“I think the biggest impact from the remnants of that system is going to be the rainfall,” Justin Shelley, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, told CTVNews.ca in an interview Monday.

“It’s long past its prime as a hurricane. It’s lost all of its tropical features that hurricanes have. So really, it’s just a bit of moisture that’s left over from that hurricane that’s going to be injected north up towards Western Canada.”

However, he added that most of that moisture would fall further east of areas such as Kamloops and Kelowna.

That said, rainfall amounts could reach upward of 50 or 60 mm in a 48-hour period.

“We’d certainly like to see sort of a longer lasting, longer duration system to really help provide a bit more moisture to these areas that need it the most. But this time, it looks like it’s going to be a relatively short-lived event, maybe two to three days at most. But I’m sure every little bit of precipitation helps in this case,” Shelley said.

Once that system moves out, he said this could lead to the further spread of wildfire smoke into parts of Western Canada later in the week, although this would depend on a number of factors such as the size of the fires and wind direction.

“So just be on the lookout for that,” Shelley said.

The rainfall advisories in Canada come at a time when the air quality is plummeting due to extensive wildfires in the western region.

As of Monday afternoon, the government of Canada had active weather alert statements for communities in southern B.C., southwest and northern Alberta, northern Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories as wildfire smoke continued to cause poor air quality and reduce visibility.

“People with lung disease (such as asthma) or heart disease, older adults, children, pregnant people and people who work outdoors are at higher risk of experiencing health effects caused by wildfire smoke,” read one of the special weather statements.

As of 3:20 p.m. ET on Monday, Canada’s air quality ranked third worst worldwide on the World Air Quality Index project, a non-profit data-driven map monitoring air pollution in 130 countries, based in Beijing, China.

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