Mother Nature strikes back
Spring storm drops more than 30 cm of snow on CBRM
Spring may have sprung, but Mother Nature has issued a white reminder that it’s still too soon to put away the shovels, plows and snowblowers.
After enjoying a relatively mild winter, Cape Breton was hammered by a storm that featured high winds and snowfall amounts of up to 35 cm. The system arrived on the island Sunday afternoon, but by Monday morning it had moved on toward Newfoundland.
And while some were touting it as a “weather bomb,” well-known meteorologist Cindy Day said that wasn’t the case with the fast-moving system.
“It was a powerful Colorado low that brought in a lot of moisture — it’s the time of year when the systems run into some cold air, and there was some pretty cold air over Ontario and Québec, and the moisture on the south side of the system really produced a lot of precipitation quickly, so it may have seemed like a weather bomb, but technically it wasn’t one in Nova Scotia,” said Day, a former television weather presenter who now serves as the chief meteorologist with the SaltWire Network, whose publications include the Cape Breton Post.
Regardless of its name, the system dropped a measured 35 cm at the Sydney airport with the accompanying high winds pushing snow drifts up to a metre high in some areas.
On Monday, classes were cancelled across the region, Cape Breton Regional Municipality transit didn’t start until mid-afternoon and many businesses delayed opening until employees could safely make it to work. All the while, fleets of provincial, municipal and privately-owned snowplows took to the roads to clean up the heavy snowfall.
Day said the storm was the first one this year that actually dropped more snow on Cape Breton than on other parts of the Maritimes.
“You dodged the other ones, but this time it got you,” she said.
“There was nothing in the southwest corner of Nova Scotia, the Valley received just a dusting and New Brunswick got nothing, but Halifax did get 23 cm and the line from the Stanfield airport up to Cape Breton was mostly in the 20 to 30 cm zone.”
Day said April is a tricky time of year when it comes to weather as just about anything is possible. She noted that Cape Breton enjoyed a heatwave of sorts at the same time last year when the mercury hit 13 C, while the region was covered by snow drifts as high as three or four metres on April 9, 1895.
The meteorologist said it should remain mild through Friday before the area experiences some cooler temperatures over the weekend.
Meanwhile, the storm did turn into a “weather bomb” early Monday morning when it hit Newfoundland with wind gusts of up to 130 km.
A weather bomb, known scientifically as explosive cyclogenesis, occurs when the central pressure of a lowpressure system falls more than 24 millibars in a 24-hour period, causing the storm to increase in rotation and intensity.