Fall officially arrives in Montreal at 4:02 p.m. on Friday — but if you've been walking the streets of Montreal lately, there's been very little evidence of that.
And Environment Canada is suggesting the summer-like conditions are expected to continue well into next week. By Sunday, we're expected to experience the kind of hot, humid day we've seen precious little of over the past few months — a high of 27 degrees, with humidex levels approaching 40.
Organizers of the Montreal Marathon took the extraordinary step of cancelling the 42-kilometre run scheduled for Sunday.
René Héroux says a lingering high-pressure system is responsible with the weather office says he doesn't expect we'll break too many temperature records, but he adds this prolonged late-season blast of summer tends to happen once in a generation.
"It's not the single days themselves...but to have that many days in a row with high temperatures, that, from a historical approach, we see that once every 30 years," Héroux says.
The average daytime high for this time of year is somewhere around 18 degrees.
Meanwhile, the weather patterns we've been seeing are having an effect on plant life — it looks as though the fall color-change season will be delayed for a little while longer. Some leaves began to turn earlier this month, but a couple of weeks of mid-summer conditions put a temporary stop to that process.
There's also some evidence of a very unusual phenomenon — September lilacs.
Alain Cogliastro, a botanist at the Botanical Garden, told La Presse that he had seen a few of the light purple flowers sprouting around town lately. They usually bloom in May.
He told the paper that it's not unusual for lilacs to bloom at this time of year — provided conditions are warm enough, which they seldom are.
Some Quebec farmers are also reporting lettuce, caulifower and broccoli plants are still growing.
Meanwhile, the Mont Saint-Sauveur water park, which closed for the season on Labor Day, has indicated it will be reopening on Sept. 23 and 24.
Management at the park says they chose to reopen this weekend to "give a gift to the population and reopen our water facilities," hoping the public takes advantage of this "exceptional opportunity."