Enjoying the weather? Don’t get used to it
Put your sneakers away and find your boots. You’ll be shovelling snow by Friday morning
WATERLOO REGION — Admit it. You got used to wearing a jean jacket in the late-February sunshine.
Strolling around ice-free duck ponds in sneakers has got you convinced spring has arrived early. Well, think again.
A welcome-to-March snow storm will hit the region by rush hour Thursday, the forecast says. By Friday morning, we could see 10-15 cm on the ground after one of the bigger snowfalls of the season.
Surprisingly, we haven’t seen a significant dump of snow in twoplus weeks, when four cm fell on Feb. 10.
And the mild temperatures that topped in the mid-teens on Wednesday? They will drop sharply toward zero on Thursday.
“This is a system coming off Texas,” Environment Canada meteorologist Geoff Coulson said on Wednesday afternoon. “We can already see it on the weather map spreading rain through Illinois and Indiana.”
By late Thursday afternoon, Coulson expects the system will likely bring a brief amount of rain to Waterloo Region, barely more than a week after rain and a big thaw busted up ice jams and caused flooding along the Grand River.
Then the rain will change to snow as the temperature drops.
More than 15 cm of snow could fall in areas closer to Lake Erie and in the Niagara Peninsula, thanks to a northeast wind off Lake Ontario.
“So, Burlington, Hamilton, around to St. Catharines, they could be looking easily at 15-plus cm,” he said. “That may be an area we end up issuing a snowfall warning for, given those amounts.”
February snowfall in Waterloo Region averages 30.6 cm for the month. We ended up getting a total of 29 cm.
“But all of that fell pretty much in the first 10 days of the month,” Coulson said. “Since then, it’s been more rain that’s been the concern.”
So more seasonal temperatures, straddling the freezing mark, return for Thursday and Friday. By Monday, we’ll return to milder-than-normal temperatures with a high of 5 C.
The good news? Coulson says a fair amount of sunshine is in the forecast for the weekend and early next week.