Watching the Port Alberni Weather since 2005

Climate Change in Port Alberni – 2026 Edition – For AVTTS “When Smoke Clears” event on Wildfire Risks and Mitigation

(Updated May 26 – post meeting)

On May 20, 2026 I was on a panel at the forum hosted by Alberni Valley Transition Town Society titled “When Smoke Clears: Wildfire Risks and Mitigation”.

This is in response to the Alberni Inlet (Mt. Underwood) wildfire last year and other nearby wildfires of late. There were representatives from the ACRD, Island Health and BCWildfire as well as our MP Gord Johns and Les Doiron Vice-President of the Nuuchanulth Tribal Council.

I was on the panel as a member of AVTTS and to bring some information about climate change and weather patterns in the Alberni Valley. I prepared a very short presentation which you can see here.

Click or tap on the slides below to move through them. Or use the link to see the presentation full-screen.

I’ve also subsequently recorded a full podcast of the presentation as I was not able to present it in full at the event due to time constraints.

what the data says

With the data and trends at hand, I believe our warming trends will continue and that we will record a temperature of 50ºC in the Alberni Valley before 2100. Demonstrated in the slide below. Check out the slides or the podcast for more details!

the data itself – archived here

The Environment and Climate Change Canada webpage for their Adjusted and Harmonized Canadian Climate Data is broken. The links for the actual data go nowhere. However, after a little digging around their web pages, I was able to find and download them. Port Alberni is only included in the datasets for temperature. It looks like they have not completed the process for the precipitation, surface pressure or wind for our area.

Here are their unmodified text data files for Port Alberni. These currently cover from 1900 to 2023.

Here are the full zip files of each temperature set for all stations. (The zips are about 35MB each)

You can get the station list here to match names to their station numbers.

Here are the graphs for Port Alberni that ECCC have produced to show the annual averages for the three temperature values, daily high, daily minimum, and daily mean temperatures.