One year ago, the southeast saw the winds pick up, the temperature drop, and some flurries start to fall. That sort of weather isn’t always unusual in April, but what happened the next day was. The southeast ended up covered in a Colorado low, depositing snow in huge amounts.
Starting yesterday, and continuing into this morning, the temperatures started to drop, the winds picked up, and scattered flurries were falling. Sound familiar?
“We definitely don’t have to worry about an event like we saw last year at this point in time,” said Environment Canada’s Brian Proctor as the meteorologist allayed fears of another ‘Snowmageddon’. “The responsible low-pressure area is now well into Manitoba, and we’re really just on the back side of that low-pressure area, so we’re just seeing flurry activity across much of southeastern Saskatchewan at this point in time.”
The system did bring quite a bit of snow to areas to the north of the southeast. Parts of the province north of the Trans-Canada Highway received snow, and the further north you went, the more fell.
“That northeast portion of the province, or north-central portion of the province, saw most of that precipitation,” Proctor explained. “We got most of the moisture for southern Saskatchewan cut off to a degree, so while we saw a few centimetres of snow, we didn’t see the tremendous amounts they saw in those areas.”
While the temperatures will be cooler heading into the weekend, a warmup is on the way. More precipitation could also be coming.
“We’re just getting out of the cold air out of these gusty north-northwest winds we’re seeing right now, starting to moderate things as we move into the weekend,” Proctor forecast. “Sunday, high plus-14, a little bit cooler on Monday as that little impulse goes across with more cloud associated but by the time we get to Tuesday, Wednesday, we’re starting to push mid- to upper-teens.”