Weather Network forecasts return to typically unpredictable spring

By The Canadian Press - Tuesday, March 5, 2013 at 11:13 AM - 0 Comments

TORONTO – One of the country’s prominent forecasters says Canadians waiting to feel some spring in their step will have to be patient.

The Weather Network says the average winter conditions experienced across the country will give way to a typical unpredictable spring in the coming weeks.

Director of Meteorology Chris Scott says spring temperatures are expected to hover near seasonal norms in most parts of the country.

He says residents of southern Ontario, Quebec and parts of Atlantic Canada may feel a little more warmth than their counterparts in the west.

Scott says stable ocean temperatures in the Pacific also suggest average levels of precipitation for most of the country.

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Seasonal forecast: ‘More winter than last year’

By The Canadian Press - Monday, November 26, 2012 at 5:26 AM - 0 Comments

TORONTO – The Weather Network’s top forecaster is advising Canadians to keep their winter mitts close and snow shovels even closer as he expects much of the country is in for a harsher blast of winter than it was dealt last year.

“We’ll get more winter this year than we did last year,” said director of meteorology Chris Scott.

And that means a return to more “typical” historic conditions of cold and snow gripping much of the country, he said.

“If you think back on Christmas Day (2011) there were many major cities in the country that didn’t have a lot of snow on the ground — and that was the theme for the winter.”

“The way things are shaping up right now we think there’ll be more cold air to work with and as a result we think that some of these storm systems that track through will dump a bit more snow than they did last year,” Scott said.

Scott and the network’s team of meteorologists are predicting that most of Atlantic Canada will see higher temperatures and more snow than usual, while the northern Prairies, Northwest Territories and western parts of Nunavut will dip below their 30-year temperature average.

The Great Lakes region and Gulf of St. Lawrence should also get more of the white stuff, he said.

But for the rest of the country, he said precipitation and temperatures should, for the most part, remain within historic norms — a return to reality after last year`s relatively mild winter.

Scott is forecasting some fluctuations where a sudden influx of warm air from the south is quickly replaced by much colder air from the north, setting the stage for more storms and snow levels matching the long-term average.

“This year you may not been in the deep freeze all the time but it does look like there will be more cold air to play with,” he said.

“If it’s cold and you’ve got moisture, you’ve got snow — that’s what we expect as a typical Canadian winter. And at least compared to last year we’ve got more of that, it looks like, on the way.”

Scott said the forecast is a “sketch” of what is likely in store for the next three months, cautioning that it’s only a cumulative average — leaving the door open for isolated weather events.

“We do think there will be extremes this winter. We will see these periods where we go from warm to cold pretty quickly.”

He said much of the methodology underpinning the network’s winter forecast stems from the presence of La Nina or El Nino systems in the tropical Pacific Ocean — which are predictable several months in advance.

Scott said that since neither of those systems are expected be particularly strong this winter season, more Arctic air is likely to move in and cool things down.

He said that climate change is “shifting the range” of weather, noting that many winters in the last decade have been warmer than the historical norms.

But that doesn’t mean less snow and higher temperatures every winter, Scott said.

“It doesn’t mean that we can’t get cold winters… if you were to project 30 to 40 years in the future, we could still get some pretty harsh winters.”

“It’s just that the odds are going to tilt towards milder winters,” he said.

Anticipation, not denial, is the first step of winter

By Scott Feschuk - Friday, November 16, 2012 at 10:26 AM - 0 Comments

Photo Illustration By Taylor Shute

It’s that difficult time of year again, but come on people, we can get through this together. To better navigate our ordeal, it’s important that we take the time to review the challenge ahead. Here are the seven stages of Canadian winter:

1. Anticipation. As the long, hot summer surrenders to the first hint of an autumn breeze, many of us experience a small thrill: winter is on its way, bringing relief from the heat and promising the many splendours that accompany the most Canadian of seasons. We envision snow-flecked landscapes, ice-covered ponds and joyful Christmas choirs. Digging deep into the closet, we gaze fondly upon our parkas and mitts. We dream of frosty adventures ahead.

2. Despair. The first cruel winds of November cut through us and we pretty much want to fall down and die right there. Three days of hostile muttering ensue.

3. Sarcasm. A huge December snowfall—awesome! And maybe a little freezing rain in there because THAT WOULD BE PLEASANT. Wake up and there’s a metre of snow in the driveway—and hey, great, it’s the wet, slushy kind that weighs about a squillion pounds per shovelful and lays those of weak heart in their graves. Yay winter! Just when we finally get it cleared—literally, just as we finish clearing it away—the plow pushes a huge drift back in front of the driveway. Thanks for that, buddy! And for the record, that could have been anyone’s snow shovel that flew through the air and struck the window of the plow’s cab. We only ran away because we were in the mood for some exercise. Continue…

INTERACTIVE: A weather forecast for the world economy

By Erica Alini - Friday, July 13, 2012 at 10:51 AM - 0 Comments

The global economy is in dire straits. Fiscal woes and persistently high unemployment are hampering the recovery in the developed world. Emerging economies like China and India are once again confronted with weaker demand for exports from rich countries, but they are also grappling with a host of domestic troubles. High oil and food prices aren’t helping. The IMF announced last week it is planning to revise down its global growth forecast for the rest of 2012, and one famed economist warned of a “perfect storm” threatening the world economy. Use the interactive chart below to see which countries and regions face the worst turbulence, and who’s still enjoying sunny skies.

Infographic by: Amanda Shendruk.

Forecast calls for more of same — only hotter

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 21, 2012 at 7:30 AM - 0 Comments

Dave Phillips is just as reliable as a heat wave in summer.

The senior climatologist at Environment Canada is the nation’s go-to guy when it comes to talking about the weather.

He tells the Globe today that when it comes to weather there’s “no guarantee.”

Even still, he’s predicting a warmer summer “from coast to coast to coast.”

“If this forecast turns out to be correct – it will be one where Canadians (will say), ‘Boy, that was a warm summer,’” Phillips told the paper.

Green Christmas

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

The number of Canadians going without snow on Christmas will be at its highest since Environment Canada began recording holiday accumulation in 1955, The Globe and Mail reports. While 85 per cent of the country will be snow-covered on Dec. 25, populated regions including several big cities will go without. Meteorologists predict snowfall for the 25 in most of the North, including the territories and northern B.C., Ontario, and Quebec, but some areas that are typically known for getting the most snow, like Winnipeg, will see green instead. Average December temperatures have jumped six or seven degrees above average across the country this year. What little snow has fallen on most southern areas has been washed away by rain. With little chance of snowstorms on the days before Christmas, shoppers will be out in full force, but likely not looking for heavy-duty winter apparel.

Globe and Mail

Heat wave hits central Canada

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 11:57 AM - 0 Comments

A blistering heat wave struck much of the country this weekend, keeping in line with predictions Canadians would see above-normal temperatures this summer. The mercury rose in Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, but the Atlantic provinces and British Columbia were left in the relative cold. Officials issued a heat and humidity warning in Montreal after temperatures hit 32 C on Sunday, while Environment Canada recorded a record-breaking high of 34.6 C at Pearson International Airport on Sunday afternoon. Manitoba and Saskatchewan are both expected to see highs in the 30s this week.

CTV News

Baby, it’s awful outside

By Jason Kirby - Thursday, January 20, 2011 at 2:54 PM - 4 Comments

Daniel Munoz/Reuters

Being a billionaire mayor in a city like New York means never having to say you’re sorry. That is, until your snow plows leave millions of residents stranded and they have to strap on skis to navigate the streets of Manhattan. And so it was that three days after a raging, thundering snowstorm dumped half a metre on the Big Apple over Christmas—the heaviest snowfall in decades—Mayor Michael Bloomberg fessed up that the city had botched the cleanup job.

It didn’t help that this was the second December in a row the city, along with the U.S. Northeast, has been hammered by wild weather. But the region was far from alone. The same massive storm system plunged 50,000 homes in Atlantic Canada into darkness as snow, wind and floods devastated beaches, parks and tourist sites. The deluge followed a series of brutal storms and Atlantic hurricanes over the past few months that have already heaped misery on residents in the region.

Mother Nature’s fury was felt everywhere. The United Kingdom is suffering the coldest winter since 1683, which along with snowstorms in New York and Moscow forced the cancellation of 6,000 flights. In California a barrage of winter storms caused flash floods and mudslides, while Los Angeles has been buffeted by hurricane-strength winds. Queensland, Australia, is drowning beneath the worst floods in half a century. Continue…

Lights out in the Maritimes (again)

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 28, 2010 at 11:44 AM - 0 Comments

Thousands of homes in the Maritimes are still without power after the fourth major storm battered Canada’s Atlantic Coast in as many weeks, intensifying the region’s economic woes. Heavy snow and strong winds descended on the area, and flights to and from Canada have been cancelled or delayed. On Tuesday, NB Power reported fewer than 9,000 homes and businesses were without electricity. And in Nova Scotia, where outages had affected up to 20,000 people, fewer than 2,000 were waiting to turn their lights back on. The full extent of the damages has yet to be assessed. But Bill Lawlor, the director of disaster management with the Canadian Red Cross in Atlantic Canada, said the toughest part of dealing with these storms lies ahead: ”Winter’s here now, and we know that repair and reconstruction will be slowed down significantly by winter setting in.”

CTV News

Europe snowed in

By macleans.ca - Monday, December 20, 2010 at 1:40 PM - 10 Comments

Canadians flying to Europe have been warned to double-check their flight schedules, since European airports have been crippled by unusually harsh winter weather. Thousands of holidays travellers have been left stranded on what is one of the busiest weeks of travel during the year. London’s Heathrow Airport stopped accepting arrivals and allowed only a handful of planes to take off Sunday because maintenance staff were unable to adequately de-ice the tarmac. Airports in France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands were also closed or experiencing delays. Air Canada says it is only able to operate one-third of its normal schedule through Heathrow, with just six takeoffs and landings allowed Monday. The unexpected shuttering of Heathrow will likely create ongoing delays, with more than a million passengers expected to pass through the airport this week.

Globe and Mail

The weather outside is frightful

By Leah McLaren - Monday, October 25, 2010 at 4:20 PM - 0 Comments

Horst Friedrichs/Anzenberger/RED

Start digging.
That’s the message one local government is giving London residents worried about what is predicted to be an unusually snowy winter for the British capital.

Camden Council, which accounts for a large swath of north and central London including Covent Garden, Bloomsbury and Primrose Hill, has unveiled a plan to encourage residents to shovel their sidewalks by providing them with the tools to do so. More than 2,000 wooden-handled, plastic snow shovels have been purchased by the local authority to be handed out for free to residents, shopkeepers or community groups.
It’s a nice gesture, by Canadian standards anyway. And a helpful one for a nation that is better accustomed to umbrellas and wellingtons than to windshield scrapers and Sorels.

But here in Britain (where even the short-range weather forecast is notoriously unreliable), the program has sparked anger among some local residents. They think it’s the government’s job to deal with snow—a rare occurrence in the south of England, and one that invariably sets off a wave of public panic before temporarily grinding the country to a halt. (Last winter’s unusually cold and snowy winter resulted in the closure of schools, businesses and public transit and reportedly cost the country as a whole more than $100 million in road repairs.)

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Extreme Weather Warning

By Cathy Gulli and Tom Henheffer - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

ADREES LATIF & RAFAEL MARCHANTE /REUTERS/ DMITRY LEBEDEV/ZUMA/KEYSTONE PRESS

Last week, after rampant forest fires had decimated thousands of hectares of his homeland, and burned alive dozens of his countrymen, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin boarded an amphibious aircraft to witness the blazes for himself. Within a few minutes of sitting in the passenger compartment, Putin—never one to resist a fight, or a photo op for that matter—strode briskly to the cockpit and assumed the co-pilot’s seat and headset. Upon direction, Putin, who doesn’t have his flying licence, swooped down and drew 12 tonnes of water from the Oka River, and then doused the scorching forests beneath, extinguishing two fires. All this in 30 minutes.

As superheroic as this act may have seemed, it fell drastically short: below, hundreds more raging fires were turning lush trees into charred toothpicks. At least 2,000 homes have burned down, including 341 in less than an hour. Survivors found nothing but scrap metal, which they gathered up to sell off. Farmers, meanwhile, have seen their grain crop cut by a third, and counting.

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Thankfully summer will soon be done

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, August 12, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

DAVIDE MONTELEONE/CONTRASTO/REDUX

No matter how often I tell myself “everything dies,” which everything certainly does—hot water bottles, for example, and I have the scald burns to prove it, and my shoes definitely get to the cremation point—still, I can’t deal with anything dying that belongs to the zoological branch of biology except mosquitoes.

I bury ladybirds and feel perfectly Gestapo-ish if my rain boots squash the worms that come out in the wet. Nothing new about this: I’ve been an animal sentimentalist since I rescued the beetle swimming in my semolina pudding at school. This past week a dead chipmunk in a small copse in our garden destroyed the summer day.

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Hail to the storm fighters

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, July 29, 2010 at 2:20 PM - 0 Comments

WEATHER MODIFICATION INC

Calgary was pummelled on July 12 by hail the size of golf balls. Bad as it was, some say it could have been worse. Earlier that day, Fargo, N.D.’s Weather Modification Inc. sent “cloud seeding” planes into the skies to try to reduce the size of the hailstones set to slam the city; it sits on the northern periphery of North America’s “hail alley.”

Some scientists believe that when silver iodide is shot into clouds, moisture will fuse around the seed; this encourages rain and hail to fall at a point, says Weather Modification field manager Tom Walton, when hailstones are “pea-sized”—before they can take out windshields and dent car hoods. “It’s hail reduction,” says Walton—“not hail elimination.” Beijing, more famously, used the process to stop rainfall during the 2008 Olympics by inducing rain outside the city. More than 40 countries have tried seeding clouds, mostly to make it rain.

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An economy under the weather

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Kevin Lamarque/ Reuters

During the first week of the 2010 Games, Vancouver’s winter weather—or more precisely, lack of it—was a hot topic. In the end, though, the spring-like conditions proved no match for a determined army of snow-shovelling workers. But while Olympic organizers were able to temporarily wrestle Mother Nature into submission, the bright minds charged with running the giant U.S. economy weren’t nearly so lucky.

In the United States, harsh winter storms pounded the densely populated eastern seaboard in February, and are blamed for taking the steam out of the country’s economic recovery. Washington, for example, was buried under more than half a metre of snow during a blizzard dubbed “Snowmageddon,” which disrupted the entire region and was followed by an encore performance less than a week later. The storms disrupted government and air travel and caused many Americans to stay home instead of going to work or to the mall, putting a dent in everything from consumer spending to employment. “This February marked the first time in recorded history that each of the 50 states had measurable snowfall in the same day,” according to UBS, a Swiss bank. “It is therefore likely that this unusual weather played at least some role in the recent string of weaker-than-expected [U.S.] economic data”

It has been a different story north of the border—and not just in Vancouver. In Toronto, the country’s financial centre, bankers and lawyers have gone nearly the entire winter with nothing but bare concrete under their leather-soled dress shoes. Meanwhile, GDP numbers shot through the roof in the fourth quarter and talk has suddenly turned to taming the recovery, instead of stoking it. Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney will likely hike interest rates to cool any overheating, but praying for a few more snowflakes couldn’t hurt.

Top 10 worst moments at the Vancouver Olympic Games

By macleans.ca - Sunday, February 28, 2010 at 9:00 PM - 13 Comments

The death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili is notably absent from this list. We at Maclean’s felt that such a tragic event had no place in such a lighthearted recap. Please see our magazine article, Who’s to blame, for our report on Kumaritashvili.

There's Snow in them-thar Hills!

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 2:13 PM - 1 Comment

Thirteen days in spring-like Vancouver made the winter part of the Winter Olympics seem a bit abstract. When people are wearing shorts around town, you feel like a bit of a knob in your fleece and ski jacket. (In my defense, it’s chilly inside the Richmond Oval, and Mom told me to keep warm.)

But here in Whistler—my assignment for the rest of the Games—the day dawned with a fresh blanket of the white stuff. It’s still more late-spring, than winter wonderland (1 degree and a bit goopey) but I’ll take it.

It’s the kind of conditions that the Canadian cross-country skiers have been waiting for. They figure the course will favour their grinding style as the 4×10 km men’s relay gets underway in five minutes.

This is probably Canada’s best hope for a medal. Should be fun.

Those forecasts weren't merely the mean-spirited warblings of Stephen Colbert

By Nicholas Köhler - Friday, February 12, 2010 at 9:34 PM - 0 Comments

What do the newcomers find as they stream off the shuttles? That the international news reports were perfectly correct: it’s raining. The party in Whistler is the equivalent of a moist toque, sopping with wet, all the fleeces gathering moisture in the streets as giant screens pipe in the opening ceremonies from down south—that is until the signal was lost. And the MCs are being forced to improvise in front of a restless crowd.