Unwanted guest — winter — lingers

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/03/2015 (3339 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you’re desperate to escape winter’s icy clutches, we have some good news and some bad news for you.

Let’s start with the good news — spring is just around the corner.

Now the bad news — the corner is just a little further away than most of us would like.

According to The Weather Network’s spring forecast for 2015, released Tuesday, this month should be colder than normal for all Canadians east of Alberta.

“We expect March to be a bit more of a winter month than a spring month in Winnipeg,” Dayna Vettese, a meteorologist with The Weather Network, told me from Oakville, Ont.

“We should be skewing a little bit on the colder side, just a tad below normal for the next couple of weeks,” Vettese noted. “The next couple of weeks will see temperatures just below freezing, and then the last half of March just above freezing. We’ll turn the corner in the second week of April.”

If you’re keeping score, the big winner is B.C., where spring has already sprung, with an exceptionally mild winter giving way to cherry blossoms and Bermuda shorts and obnoxious phone calls to relatives in colder provinces.

In contrast, the biggest losers are Eastern and Atlantic Canada, where record snowfalls will help keep temperatures on the nasty side, because the sun’s energy will go into melting the snow before it can start warming the air.

When it comes to being normal, Winnipeg is ahead of the pack.

“If we take March out of the equation, it doesn’t look like too bad a spring in Winnipeg,” the meteorologist said of the outlook for the next three months.

“Winnipeg’s spring will average out to near normal by the end after a sluggish start,” she said. “If we were going to pick any place in the country that would be near normal for spring, it would be Winnipeg and southern Saskatchewan.

“B.C.’s got the mildest spring on tap, Manitoba is kind of average and Eastern Canada is the coldest. It will take a lot longer to get that snow out of the way and feel like spring in the east.”

After enduring the harshest winter in more than 100 years, Winnipeg lucked out this season because the core of the coldest weather shifted slightly to the east.

“You (Winnipeg) were the most below-normal place in the world last winter,” Vettese chirped. “This year, the colder air is funnelling down to Ontario and Quebec.”

Our December and January surprisingly proved warmer than normal this winter, with daytime highs averaging around -6 C and -9 C, respectively, compared with normal highs of -9 C and -11 C for those two months.

On the downside, February was a bit harder to survive, with the average high around -14 C, compared with the normal high of -8 C for that month.

“Last year, Winnipeg was below normal all three winter months,” Vettese noted. “It will be a more normal transition to spring than last year. Still a little slow, but much better than last year. It’s not a bad forecast. We don’t expect it to be wildly cold. Just a little colder for the next couple of weeks, and then we’ll get back to normal.”

The meteorologist predicted we’ll be looking at near-normal temperatures over the next three months — with daytime highs averaging around 9 C to 10 C — and nothing like the soaring mountain of snow the city battled last winter.

“We don’t expect anything too abnormal in terms of snowfall,” she promised.

The city dug out from under 40 to 50 centimetres of snow this winter, she said. That compares with about 60 cm in a normal winter and closer to 100 cm last year during the Winter That Wouldn’t Die.

Like the Jets’ surging playoff hopes, temperatures in Winnipeg should tick upwards by month’s end as the city gets a blast of milder air from the west.

The only question that stumped the Weather Network meteorologist was whether she believes the famous legend stating the vernal equinox, the first day of spring, which this year falls on March 20, is the ONLY day on which it is possible to perfectly balance a raw egg on its end.

The folklore, at least the bits we partially understood, states because the Earth’s axis is perpendicular to the sun at the equinox, causing day and night to be of equal length, the sun is therefore equidistant between the poles of the Earth, meaning special gravitational forces apply and, well, you catch our general non-scientific drift.

“I don’t know if I know what to say about the egg theory,” she chortled.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca