After a brutal winter: a warmerthan-normal spring, summer
WATERLOO REGION — After enduring unseasonably cold, back-to-back winters, there’s finally something to look forward to.
It’s shaping up to be a warmer-than-normal April. And spring. And even summer.
Armed with new longrange weather forecasts, Environment Canada’s David Phillips shared the good news Wednesday.
We just have to get through a rather cold Easter weekend first.
Highs of just 0 and 2 C are forecast Saturday and Sunday, with a 40 per cent chance of snow on Saturday. The normal high this time of year is 8 C.
That comes right on the heels of the 13 C temperatures and thunderstorm risk on Thursday and showers and 10 C on Friday.
“Over the next week or two, we’ll see that interplay, that back and forth” in temperatures, Phillips said.
“Those warm interludes will become longer than the cold interludes.”
Winter officially drew to a close last month, with the region’s average temperatures for March about 2.5 degrees colder than normal.
“Clearly not the brutality of February,” Phillips said, which sported average temperatures about 10 degrees below normal.
March also saw an impressive stretch of nearly 49 days of below-freezing temperatures finally snapped.
But it was a particularly dry month, with just 10 centimetres of snow, compared to the norm of 27, and 7 millimetres of rain, compared to a norm of 37.
Taking a five-month period from November through March into account, the winter just past was actually a bit milder than the one before, Phillips said. But together, they were the coldest back-to-back winters in the Great Lakes in 68 years.