This summer is promising to be a hot one, according to a forecast released Friday by Environment Canada.
Dave Phillips, Environment Canada's chief climatologist, predicts temperatures this summer will be above average.
"In the last 20 years, 15 of those summers have been warmer than normal across Canada. So you don't even need a super computer to guess at what the forecast is going to be, and we think it will be another warm one," Phillips told CTV's Canada AM.
Warmer than normal temperatures can be expected across the vast majority of Canada, from British Columbia right through to Newfoundland and Labrador.
Phillips said there are a couple of exceptions to the rule, such as off the coast of Nova Scotia and near Vancouver where colder water temperatures are expected to bring cooler than normal temperatures.
"Not every day, not every weekend, maybe not when you have your holidays, but it looks like the character, the personality of the summer this year across the country will be warmer than normal."
Although a hot summer promises more opportunities for beach-going and sun-bathing, it also enhances the effects of smog and raises the risk of forest fires, said Phillips.
"Certainly in eastern Canada a warm day often translates into a smog day," Phillips said.
"We've had already almost as many smog days this year in parts of southern Ontario as we had all of last summer, which is a bit scary.
"The other thing too, with warmer than normal weather, it tends to create more forest fire situations. We've already seen that in eastern Canada. So I think that there will be more of that."
Phillips said he is cautious about linking weather trends to climate change and global warming, but the trend over the past four decades seems to indicate a steady increase in temperatures.
"I never get excited about one season or even one year, but if you look at the last 40 seasons in Canada, stick a thermometer into Canada and it's saying hot, hot, hot," Phillips said.
"And we've had 38 of those 40 seasons have been warmer than normal. ... I think two years ago was a good example here in eastern Canada where we had temperatures almost 4 degrees above normal and we had 41 hot days instead of the 12 we normally get."
Phillips called that season a "dry run" for the kind of summers that are going to become increasingly common.
In the past 20 years, only one Canadian summer has been colder than normal, and that came in 1992 when a volcanic explosion sent massive amounts of ash into the atmosphere, cooling the globe's temperature by several degrees.
"I think we have to get used to it. Warmer than normal seems to be the operative word."
