How warm was 2024 in the Northwest Territories?

In 2023, some Northwest Territories communities faced record heat that helped to drive the worst wildfire season the territory has seen. So how about 2024?

We’ve taken figures from weather stations in four NWT communities to come up with their annual mean temperature for 2024.

That involves taking all of 2024’s hourly temperature measurements at each of those weather stations, then averaging the result.

We’ll start with Yellowknife, which had an annual mean temperature of -0.6C in 2023 – the warmest in a record stretching back to the 1950s. (When we first reported this, on December 31, 2023, we gave the figure as -0.5C. However, December 31 itself was just cold enough that by the time it ended, it was enough to tip the average to -0.6C when rounded.)

Yellowknife in 2024 registered an annual mean temperature of -2.6C.

That’s a lot closer to the average for recent years. Here are two ways of visualizing the record from the mid-1950s to now.

Yellowknife’s 2024 annual mean temperature of -2.6C is pretty similar to the city’s figures for 2012, 2015, 2016 and 2017. It’s not as warm as 2023 but a fair amount warmer than the period from 2018 to 2022, which were between -4C and -5C.

What’s more noteworthy, though, is the trend over time.

Look back at the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and Yellowknife simply was not that warm. Only starting in the 1980s does an occasional year register an annual mean temperature between -2C and -3C.

Meanwhile, an annual mean of -6C – which used to be pretty common – now hasn’t happened since 2004 and looks increasingly unlikely.

When we last reported on this, we focused only on Yellowknife. This time around, we’ve looked at the records of three other NWT communities.

Let’s move to Inuvik next.

Inuvik, like Yellowknife, posted an annual mean temperature in 2024 that isn’t unusual in this century so far: -6.3C.

Unlike Yellowknife, 2023 hadn’t been a record year in Inuvik. It was still at the extreme warm end of the spectrum, but 1998 had been slightly warmer. (Note, by the way, that the colour scale changes from graph to graph: the coldest blue and warmest red represent slightly different temperatures for each community we’re showing you. Inuvik is the coldest of the four communities we’re looking at, so the scale here stretches from -12C to -4C, which is colder than for the others.)

The trend over time is similar to Yellowknife.

Inuvik used to have annual mean temperatures below -10C on a regular basis, but the last one of those came in 1984. The last noticeably cold year on the record, by modern standards, was 2004.

Now let’s look at Hay River.

Hay River’s 2024 annual mean was -1C. Like Inuvik and Yellowknife, this is toward the warmer end of the spectrum but not a record. (Hay River’s record was 2023, the only time its annual mean has been above zero.)

As with the other communities, there is a warming trend over time.

Comparing the Inuvik and Hay River charts, Inuvik in the 2020s is now registering annual mean temperatures that are sometimes equivalent to what you might have experienced in Hay River – about 800 km farther south – in the 1960s.

Lastly, we’ll turn to Fort Simpson.

The overall pattern in Fort Simpson is similar to that of Hay River, and the temperatures involved aren’t too different. (Reliable data starts in different years for different communities, which is why the start year changes for each chart.)

Again, 2023 was Fort Simpson’s record year: 0.4C. In 2024, the village recorded an annual mean of -1.2C, which is a fairly standard result now but didn’t happen before the 1980s.

For more on this kind of change over time, check out our 2021 article about how much colder Yellowknife used to be.

Meanwhile, 2024 has started on a brutally cold note in many areas of the NWT. Places like Norman Wells dropped to -44C before wind chill over the weekend.

That’s likely to change significantly in the days ahead, with warmer weather expected.

Environment Canada even forecasts temperatures above freezing for Hay River and Fort Simpson later in the week.