It was a year of weather extremes in Toronto and the surrounding region, and 2024 can now lay claim to another note in the city's climactic history books.

Sunday marked the 185th consecutive day of downtown Toronto temperatures reaching 11 degrees C, with the stretch from April 26 to October 27, 2024, tying a record set 53 years earlier.

The last time Toronto saw such a sustained stretch of temperatures above this mark was from the stretch spanning May 3 to November 3, 1971.

As of Monday afternoon, temperatures hover just below 11 C, and a projected high of 12 degrees would see the record broken.

🥇Today is #Toronto's 185th consecutive day with maximum temperature ≥11°C which puts this run in a 2-way tie for 1st place for the longest run on record. #YyzWx #TOWx #YYZ #ONWx pic.twitter.com/15OdgseW0P

— Toronto Weather Records🌤 (@YYZ_Weather) October 27, 2024

Records are piling up

While we aren't talking about a sustained period of extreme heat or even anything resembling heat, the latest record adds another brushstroke to an increasingly concerning pattern of rising temperatures.

In addition to this week's record, Toronto Weather Records reported that Oct. 28 marked Toronto-Pearson Airport's 186th consecutive day with maximum temperature exceeding 9 C.

This marks the seventh-longest run since record-keeping began, and is the longest such streak in almost a decade and a half, since Oct 20, 2010.

On top of these streaks, the record-sharing account reported that Sunday marked the 210th consecutive day that temperatures remained at or above 1 degree — the sixth-longest run without freezing temperatures on the books.

Experts weigh in

All of these heat-related records come just a few days after Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) issued a press release announcing that heat records were matched or broken nationwide this past summer.

ECCC warns that climate-related weather events previously considered to be "once in 100 years" risks are becoming "more frequent, severe, and costly."

However, as climate scientists sound the alarm on rising temperatures nationwide, ECCC officials stress that while the local data observations shared on these accounts are "interesting," they are not necessarily cause for panic.

Geoff Coulson, a meteorologist with Environment Canada, tells blogTO that "generally, we've been close to normal or warmer than normal for a number of months now, not just in Toronto, but across southern Ontario."

Still, Coulson notes that there are "not necessarily clear linkages between some of these interesting factoids versus the research that may be being done by the climate researchers at ECCC."

Average annual temperatures nationwide increased by 2 degrees, according to ECCC data, and scientists believe that human-caused climate change will only continue to worsen and increase the likelihood of Canada's worst heat waves.

Coulson acknowledges that "there's been an overall increase nationwide in terms of average temperature, and certainly there's linkages being made to climate change for that," but stresses that ECCC's research in this area focuses more on weather extremes than sustained patterns of above-normal temperatures.