Vancouver's rain comes in winter
Vancouver had over 200 mm of rain in January and again in each month from October to December, far more than any other city in those months.
Canadian weather trends, 2021–2025
A Power BI report that compares rainfall, snowfall and temperature extremes across four Canadian cities, with year and city filters on every page.
- Role
- Data cleaning, modeling, dashboard design
- Data
- Airport weather stations in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal, 2021–2025
- Tools
- Power BI, Excel, Power Query
- Deliverable
- 3-page interactive Power BI report
Problem
How do rain, snow and temperature extremes differ between Canada's largest cities, and how does that change from one year to the next?
Approach
- Cleaned the raw station datasets in Excel and Power Query, then loaded them into a single Power BI model.
- Added year and city slicers to every page, so each view can be narrowed to one year or a subset of cities.
- Designed each page around one question: how much precipitation falls and when, how extreme the temperatures get, and where the snow is.
The report
Open the full report (PDF)
Key findings for 2024
Toronto and Montreal peak in summer
Rainfall in the two eastern cities rose through the summer, reaching about 215 mm in Toronto in July and about 240 mm in Montreal in August.
Calgary is the snowiest and coldest
Calgary had the most snow, peaking near 70 cm in March, and the lowest reading of the year at −36.2 °C.
Vancouver has the mildest range
The year's high across all four cities was 34.5 °C. Vancouver's high stayed below 30 °C and its low was about −14 °C.
Limitations
Each city is represented by one airport weather station, which can differ from conditions elsewhere in the metro area. Totals on the precipitation page add all selected stations together, so they're for comparing selections rather than describing any one city.
Five years is too short to call anything a climate trend. The report is best used to compare cities and years, not to project forward.