Heavenly Halo

I want to thank Phillip Chee from the Peterborough Astronomical Association for sending in this pic! This is a great shot of a 22 degree lunar halo taken from Armour Hill on Saturday night. This is what the moon looks like through a thin veil of cirrus clouds on a cold night. The ice crystals high up in the atmosphere are what cause this phenomenon and it makes for a great picture! The P.A.A. was taking advantage of a little less light pollution during Earth Hour on Saturday night and nearly 100 folks who gathered on Armour Hill had a chance to enjoy sights like this. Phillip also used time-lapse photography to put together a nice movie file of the moon moving across the sky. Click here to check it out. Thanks Phillip!

It's Not All Bad

With all of the recent talk about the cold weather I thought I'd throw this up on the blog. You should always take the 7 Day Forecast with "a grain of salt" as the accuracy of the forecast models drops big time after the first 3-5 days. While I can't promise it will still look this good by Monday's weathercast, temperatures do look to improve by the start of next week. So after a cool weekend things look to be on the up...temperature-wise that is. Have a great weekend!

Bundle Up!

Well a big chill is on the way tonight and tomorrow's weather will be very different than the mild weather we've seen over the last few days. In short...It's going to be cold. Very cold. Looking at the national map above we can see exactly where this polar air mass is originating from (the blues and purples) and it's on our doorstep.

Looking at today's daytime highs map you can see the mean position of the approaching cold front earlier today. Ahead of that front our region was under the inluence of calm, southwesterly winds and we fell just short of a double digit high. Looking north toward Sudbury and Timmins you can see much cooler daytime highs between 2 and 5 degrees as that cold front pushed through the north late this morning when those high temperatures were recorded. Timmins high may have been plus two (around seasonal) but it was below freezing into the afternoon. Our high of 9 occured at noon today but by 3pm we were already closer to 5 degrees...and that temperature will continue to drop.

Looking at our CHEX TV Future Look Model that cold front will be southeast of us by 8pm tonight and that cold, polar air will continue to push into the region unobstructed over the next 12 hours. By 6am it will likely be minus 14 in Peterborough (feeling like minus 20) and minus 17 to the north (feeling like minus 24). Tomorrow we can expect a high of plus one and it will remain slightly below seasonal through the weekend. Don't worry about the cold too much though as the long range models show a warm-up early next week. We'll be back to double digits by Tuesday.