{UAH} Iconic Rideau Canal skating rink at the weather’s mercy
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Iconic Rideau Canal skating rink at the weather's mercy
Daily Brew – Thu, 24 Dec, 2015
[The Rideau Skateway winds through downtown Ottawa and is the perfect place to practice your spins and jumps. PHOTO COURTESY: Brittany Jones-Cooper]
Ice-skating on the longest rink in the world is a winter tradition for many Canadians living in the country's capital. But with record temperatures hitting Ottawa this winter, the fate of the Rideau CanalSkateway this season isn't looking good.
It's currently 16 C in Ottawa, a temperature that's nearly unheard of for this time of year.
"This is unprecedented to what we've ever seen," David Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment Canada, tells Yahoo Canada News. "We think the second half of winter will be more winter-like than what we've had, but gosh, we've had nothing. You've got a lot of time to make up."
He predicts the upcoming months will see patches of colder weather, mixed with warmer days, as oppose to one long, wintery season.
"It will be melting and thawing and freezing and snow and then the ground appearing, and then coming back white," he says. "That's the kind of back and forth kind of a winter we see ahead of us."
These kinds of conditions aren't conducive for the canal, which needs constant cold weather to freeze over producing the necessary 30 centimetre of ice ideal for skating. El Nino, an irregularly occurring and complex series of climatic changes that take their toll on the equatorial Pacific region, is largely to blame for this kind of unprecedented weather pattern.
Jasmine Leduc is the communications officer with the National Capital Commission, which runs the rink. She admits that the unseasonably balmy climate has affected how things run, but hasn't lost hope that things could change in the near future.
"The weather decides the opening of the Rideau Canal Skateway and this natural feature contributes to making the feature attractive," she says. "As you know, Canadian weather temperatures do fluctuate. At this time it's too early to speculate on the timing of the opening of the Skateway."
The Rideau Canal Skateway sees an average of 900,000 visitors a year, with about 19,000 visitors a day.
The actual length of the skating surface equals to more than 105 National Hockey League rinks, or more than 90 Olympic-sized hockey rinks. In total, it runs 165,621 square metres.
The average length of the skating season in the past five years has been 54 days. The longest skating season was in 1971-1972, which lasted a total of 90 days. The shortest skating season was in 2001-2002, lasting 35 days, though not consecutively — in total the ice was only skateable for 26 of those days.
There's hope this time around though — the latest the Canal Skateway has opened was Feb. 2 back in 2002.
The canal was originally built between 1826 and 1832 by thousands of Irish and French-Canadian labourers, under the guidance of Lt.-Col. John By.
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