The Return of Winter?

If you needed another reason to be happy about living here in the Kawarthas just look at that pic above. That’s a shot of my latest weather map and that powerful storm hammering the prairies. Calgary is now recovering from that system and is warming up from yesterday’s daytime high of around the freezing mark. After hammering Calgary the snow line moved just a little to the east and now Lethbridge is dealing with a major winter storm. To the west of that low pressure center are strong northerly winds (in excess of 90km) and heavy, wet snow. This deadly combination has resulted in both school and road closures and power out ages across the city of Lethbridge. Even as I write this blog blizzard and winter storm warnings are still in effect for many communities across the southern prairies and that same system is on its way here…sort of.

I’ve had a few calls today from concerned viewers asking me what we can expect as that system pushes east. Luckily we dodge a bullet. Looking at the pic above you can see that that ridge of high pressure over Ontario that is blocking this storm’s track. As that western trough in the jet stream is trying to “dig” east it is being slowed by that “blocking high.” When a low is stalled we start to see an occlusion form as the cold air literally “catches up” to the warm air in advance of the low. That funny pink front you see is called an “occluded front” and it’s like a zipper being done up between the cold and warm front. Cold air starts to surround the low at the surface forcing the warm aloft and this weakens the storm. In short, this means that by the time this system crosses north of our region it will be a much weaker storm. For Peterborough we can expect showers (starting as early as tomorrow afternoon) with rain late Friday into Saturday. Communities to the north (Haliburton and Bancroft) may experience some thunderstorm activity…but no snow. So let’s be happy with the rainy forecast to round out the week. The rain is much needed and I’ll take showers over 20cm of wet snow any day.