the statements by the weather forecasters about "meteorological summer" ending on september 1st are about 40 years out of touch with reality (like most of the culture on this continent is because it wants to stagnate, it doesn't want to change), but it probably never applied well to the very southern part of ontario, which is in a different climate zone than anywhere else in canada and always has been. this is the windsor-london-niagara triangle that includes sarnia, kitchener-waterloo-cambridge-guelph and hamilton but does not include toronto proper. the golden horseshoe gtha idea is an economic region, not a climate region. it's actually three climate zones, as it very quickly gets very cold when you start moving towards lake huron. it can often be a twenty degree difference from the north of the gtha to the south of it. toronto is kind of it's own thing, climatologically, as it's sandwiched in the northernmost habitable zone south of the canadian shield. you can't grow anything north of toronto because of the rocks. it's a little better to the east, around ottawa and montreal and up the coast towards quebec city, but directly north of toronto is sudbury, and it's a dead zone of frigid 9 month-long winter emptiness. it's likely that they faked the moon landing in this region. it's that cold and dead. living here full time generates addictions issues because it's just empty and barren. all you can realistically do in the swath of land north of toronto is mine in the summer and go home in the winter. it's a wasteland. i'm in south detroit, i'm not in west toronto, but the north of michigan and minnesota are also barren rock where nothing grows and you can't realistically have any kind of year round economy.
in the south of ontario in 2026, summer doesn't certainly end until early november but a concept of meteorological fall begins to vaguely define itself in mid october (well after sept 21st, and never ever before it). it's generally the wrong way to look at it as the seasons don't predictably or incrementally change here. we do not have four clearly defined seasons in this region anymore.
rather, what happens in windsor is that the heat cracks some time between oct 5th and nov 10th. you might have rainy systems before then (we did this year) with cooler days and shots of gulf humidity pushing north up the mississippi after but you know when the heat breaks and it doesn't come back until next year. it's a sudden singular event. it might not even rain but it just crashes - it goes from 25 degrees one day to 10 degrees (or lower) the next day and then it stays cold for a week and doesn't get back to 20 degrees, except maybe for an hour at a time, until the spring. what's happening is that the jet stream is dipping. we are, for much of the year, on or close to the jet stream so we experience rapid shifts tied to shifts in the jet stream, rather than incremental changes tied to seasonal procession.
that's why climate change is so powerful right here - we're on the boundary between a concept of north and a concept of south. if the jet stream consistently and reliably pushes north due to increases in hot air overpowering, we exit canada, from a climate perspective. when the atmosphere to our south is hotter, it pushes the jet stream further north, extends our summers into mid november and can neutralize or even eliminate our winters. there are a lot of signals that this year might be the year that we finally truly don't have anything resembling a winter - where it's summer for both canadian and american thanksgiving, it's raining and 10+ degrees for christmas and new years and it's spring by valentine's day and summer by st patrick's day. we've had teases of this but not the full thing in one year, not yet. it might be this year and windsorites (and detroiters) should take note of the dramatic shift, which will be even more dramatic in historically just-as-cold-as-detroit chicago and indianopolis and pittsburgh.
for now, we're waiting for the heat to crash. it's imminent; it could happen any day now. but there's no sign of it in the forecast - it's 25 degrees for the next week.
if the heat doesn't crash until december, we'll need to record 2026 as year 0 on a new climate calendar for this region, where winter is now officially permanently cancelled and fall might not start until dec 1st or later.