page_title: Yellowknife
section_title: Climate
hierarchical_section_title: Yellowknife / Geography / Climate
caption_attribution_description: English: This photo was taken on 13 January 2020 around 10:00am.
context_page_description: Yellowknife is the capital, only city, and largest community in the Northwest Territories, Canada. It is on the northern shore of Great Slave Lake, about 400 km south of the Arctic Circle, on the west side of Yellowknife Bay near the outlet of the Yellowknife River.
  Yellowknife and its surrounding water bodies were named after a local Dene tribe at one time known as the "Copper Indians" or "Yellowknife Indians", today incorporated as the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, who traded tools made from copper deposits near the Arctic Coast. Its population, which is ethnically mixed, was 19,569 per the 2016 Canadian Census. Of the eleven official languages of the Northwest Territories, five are spoken in significant numbers in Yellowknife: Dene Suline, Dogrib, South and North Slavey, English, and French. In the Dogrib language, the city is known as Sǫ̀mbak'è. Modern Yellowknives members can be found in the adjoining, primarily Indigenous communities of Ndilǫ and Dettah.
  The Yellowknife settlement is considered to have been founded in 1934, after gold was found in the area, although commercial activity in the present-day waterfront area did not begin until 1936.
context_section_description: Yellowknife has a continental subarctic climate (Köppen: Dfc). Although winter is predominantly polar, rapid heat waves emerge at the summit of summer due to the immense path south. The city averages less than 300 millimetres (12 in) of precipitation annually, as it lies in the rain shadow of mountain ranges to the west. Due to its location on Great Slave Lake, Yellowknife has a frost-free growing season that averages slightly over 100 days. In an occasional year, the first fall frost does not come until October. Most of the limited precipitation falls between June and October, with April being the driest month of the year and August having the most rainfall. Snow that falls in winter accumulates on the ground until the spring thaw.
  Yellowknife experiences very cold winters and mild to warm summers. The average temperature in January is around −26 °C (−15 °F) and 17 °C (63 °F) in July. According to Environment Canada, Yellowknife has the sunniest summer in the country, averaging 1,034 hours from June to August. The lowest temperature ever recorded in Yellowknife was −51.2 °C (−60 °F) on 31 January 1947, and the highest was 32.5 °C (90.5 °F) on 16 July 1989. Yellowknife averages 2256.5 hours of bright sunshine per year or 43.5% of possible daylight hours, ranging from a low of 15.4% in December to a high of 63.0% in June. Due to its warm summer temperatures, Yellowknife is well below the Arctic tree line in stark contrast to areas further east in Canada on similar parallels.
  In 2014, Environment Canada ranked Yellowknife as having the coldest winter and longest snow cover season of any city in Canada, while also experiencing the sunniest spring and summer of any city in Canada.
caption: Heavy ice fog can develop on the coldest winter mornings
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