On your hats and mittens, because that’s the way it is Federation in Quebec! With what feels like -40 degrees at the end of the day, it will be colder in Montreal than in Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost capital.
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As of 8am Friday morning, the mercury was close to -24C in the metropolis, with a felt time of around -39 and -40.
In Longyearbyen, a small mining town of 2,500 people on the island of Spitsbergen in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, the weather had dropped to minus 24 degrees Celsius. But hey, rejoice: residents of this arctic community can’t enjoy the sun as it’s currently dark 24 hours a day.
AFP
PHOTO Screenshot, The Weather Channel
And if you thought it was colder in Siberia than in Montreal, you are wrong! In Norilsk, the northernmost city with more than 100,000 inhabitants, the temperature feels like -15 °C.
PHOTO Screenshot, The Weather Channel
A polar vortex
The cold wave currently raging in the province is due to the polar vortex, a very cold zone at high altitudes that normally stays above the two poles of the earth.
Montreal hasn’t seen mercury at -30C in almost 30 years, MétéoMédia recalls. It was last that cold on January 27, 1994, when the thermometer showed -31.8°C.