By Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen, May 31st, 2017.
More than a foot of rain in the past two months has washed away all kinds of weather records in Ottawa.Wettest May. Wettest April and May combined. Wettest spring. (The weather office defines spring as March 1 through May 31.) Rainiest first five months of the year.And most of these are records not by a millimetre, but by huge margins.May (measured through Tuesday) had a record of 175.6 millimetres of rain at the Ottawa International Airport, more than double the average of 86. Records there go back to 1939.“If it was just May, then nobody would feel sorry for you,” said David Phillips, senior climatologist at Environment Canada. But there’s much more: