Are Nova Scotia summers washing away?

I call it the Nova Scotia summer magic. And I've yet to meet someone who disagrees.

Two months we wait the other ten for. Every activity packed into eight weekends. Beaches. Boats. Bonfires. Life happens in July and August, and if we’re lucky, the sunshine comes in June and stays through September.

It’s why most people live here. And it's definitely the reason people visit.

So I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t the Nova Scotia magic that called me home. I moved back in July after six years in the UK. But I arrived only to find the spell broken. The magic was gone.

So where did it go?

It rained almost half the summer. But as you can see in the following chart, the proportion of rainy days in 2023 was pretty on par with recent years.

If we then look at the trend of daily rainfall during the summers of 2020, 2021 and 2022, they are quite similar: more days with low amounts of rainfall. But 2023 was a different story.

It wasn't the frequency of rain that made this summer feel dreary. It was the volume. It rained more this summer compared to any summer in the last decade. Quite a bit more, as you can see in this next chart.

And our precious summer weekends? More often than not we found ourselves in the midst of bucketing down rain or a tropical storm. Summer weekends – usually ripe for activities – were basically puddles between work weeks.

Summer rain check, please

As Nova Scotians, we don’t tend to let weather dampen our spirits. But this summer was an exception. Plans were cancelled. Weddings were postponed. Our tears joined the puddles. 

And I was left reconsidering my move home. Ironically, from a place with 100 different names for rain.

So here’s hoping we get the magic back next summer. But what seems more likely is that we're in for more wet, not-necessarily-hot, east coast Canadian summers.

A note on the data:

Halifax International Airport was chosen as the location for this article because it’s a central area that represents provincial rainfall and it was the only location with a decade of historical data. All data used in this article is publicly available on Environment Canada.