David Phillips was a year old when he saw his first tornado.
As his mother later told him, she lifted her baby to the window to see the tornado ripping through west Windsor in 1946. Their Prince Road home didn’t have a basement.
He obviously doesn’t remember what would become the third deadliest tornado in Canadian history with 17 people killed.
But it is his Windsor roots and that extreme Windsor weather as the thunderstorm capital of Canada, the country’s most humid city and the spot with the warmest fall seasons that helped turn him into Canada’s crackerjack of climatology.
“Windsor is the weather capital of Canada. If you want to be a weather weenie you just have to live in the City of Windsor.”
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David Phillips, senior climatologist at Environment Canada, is shown at Windsor’s Holy Names High School on March 27, 2018, where he introduced the Climate Crusaders program.
Phillips is the senior climatologist at Environment Canada, author of a few books including Blame it on the Weather and creator of the Canadian Weather Trivia Calendar which made the federal government millions of dollars.
He’s a reporter’s dream, a quote machine. He’ll cheerily calculate the chance of a white Christmas or check if his former hometown set a heat record. It’s “Goldilocks kind of weather” when it’s not too hot or too cold and he described one cold snap as being like a “punch in the face” and “almost ice age cometh.”
At 72, he’s relishing his 51st year with Environment Canada, where he splits his time between the Toronto office and his Barrie home. He fields about 600 media calls annually, gives 50 speeches a year and writes articles and the top ten weather events of the year. He’s collected an archive of 35,000 weather stories to be tops in trivia and provide the “gee, wow, whiz” of weather.
A member of the Order of Canada, and so recognizable when out in public that people on the Go Train will sometimes tell him their beef with the weather, Phillips could have retired 16 years ago on full pension. But he loves his job.
He’s almost apologetic about his disinterest in weather as a child. He wanted to be a teacher.
“You know, in a way I am a teacher because my classroom is Canada. My job is to talk to young people, old people, to raise awareness of weather and climate,” Phillips said of his quest to entertain and educate.
“I often feel like I’m the old snake oil salesman. You do that song and dance. You build them up to a fever pitch and then you sell them the bill of goods. You can’t just come in and say I’m going to talk to you about the most important environmental issue humankind has ever faced. They’re going to tune you out. You’ve got to tell them about the weird, wild and wacky weather and then you can sort of ease into it.”
He can’t help but think weather trivia. On a recent Windsor visit, he opened the hotel window drapes, saw rain and instinctively checked to see when it had last rained: 26 days earlier. He opened his speech to Grade 8 students monitoring weather with rain gauges with that factoid as bonus trivia. He had already calculated 38 million raindrops would fall on your head if you stood outside every time it rained in Windsor for a year.
“They look like hamburger buns. They have flat bottoms and curved sides,” Phillips said challenging how people usually draw raindrops. “So think of all the big Whoppers that are falling into your rain gauge.”
Windsor is the weather capital of Canada
Phillips was in high school studying weather when to his amazement his mother mentioned he’d seen a tornado. He started researching and reading newspaper accounts of the June 17, 1946, disaster.
After studying geography at the University of Windsor, Phillips had a job lined up at Riverside high school when he went to a job interview with Environment Canada. He didn’t want the job. Phillips was writing a paper on climatologist Kenneth Hare and wanted to talk to the job interviewer who had been Hare’s student. Phillips still didn’t want the job when he landed a second interview but thought he’d try the Great Lakes research position for a year.
He’s spent more than a half a century as a climatologist with Environment Canada. Don’t call him Dave or a meteorologist. He isn’t a weather forecaster. Climatologists are weather historians who do seasonal forecasts or forecasts into the next century, he said.
“Warmer, wilder and wetter is my forecast for Windsor 70 years from now,” he said.
A century ago there were about 19 days a year when the temperature rose above 30 Celsius. From 1981 to 2010 there was an average of 23 hot days over 30 C. He expects by 2100 that will increase by 60 days to 83 hot days a year.
Using historical data, world climate models and assuming no change in emissions, Phillips expects Windsor’s average annual temperature to jump five degrees by 2100 and for total precipitation to increase 15 per cent. Windsorites will have to adapt to temperatures more like Tennessee or Georgia with a rare white Christmas.
He likes to see records broken but now places across the country are seeing records smashed. “Clearly this is an indication that something is happening to our climate.”
It’s just more weather trivia for Canada’s king of climatology. Soon enough he’ll get a call from a reporter who likely wasn’t born when Phillips started his career and he’s found an eager audience in his two grandchildren.
“My granddaughter will often say ‘tell me a good weather story.'”
And he does.
shill@postmedia.com
twitter.com/winstarhill
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David Phillips, senior climatologist at Environment Canada is shown at Windsor’s Holy Names High School on March 27, 2018, where he introduced the Climate Crusaders program.
