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Top weather photos from 2018

As global temperatures continued to rise in 2018, breaking heat records around the world, the year saw cases of disastrous weather events seemingly on the rise as well.

The 2018 wildfire season brought an extremely rare outbreak of fires north of the Arctic Circle in Scandinavia, including one at the Russia-Finland border on July 20.

“This fire season has been pretty crazy,” says Lynn Johnston, a forest fire research specialist with the Canadian Fire Service.

British Columbia experienced its second worst wildfire season ever, with only the 2017 season considered worse. California experienced its single largest fire on record, as well as a fire that destroyed more structures than any other in the state’s history.

“With climate change, it’s hotter and drier, we’re seeing more extremes” Lynn Johnston

Johnston warns summers like this one will be increasingly more common in the future, as hot, dry, windy conditions, storms and lightning become more common and more intense.

“With climate change, it’s hotter and drier, we’re seeing more extremes in winds and really, really dry fuels producing really extreme fire behaviour,” she said.

Wet weather also had a moment this year, burying parts of Ontario under ice in April and hammering West Africa, Cape Verde, Bermuda, the East Coast of the United States and Atlantic Canada with hurricanes like Florence and Michael.

Then there were the major events precipitated by weather: the Thai cave rescue, the Morandi bridge collapse. In Montreal, 53 people died as the result of an intense heat wave.

Not all of 2018’s extreme weather events were deadly, but they all generated a lot of interest among Yahoo Canada’s readers. Here is a gallery of 10 of the most searched weather events of the year among Yahoo Canada readers.