WET, WINTRY WEATHER HEADING OUR WAY
Waterloo Region will be right on the dividing line between rain and freezing rain
WATERLOO REGION — As a pair of wintry weather systems bear down on southern Ontario, there’s good news and bad news for our region.
The good news — as least as far as Environment Canada meteorologist Etienne Gregoire predicts — is that Waterloo Region should dodge the worst of the freezing rain and snow that’s en route to parts of Ontario.
The bad news is that we’ll still see a lot of precipitation, likely in the form of heavy rain over the weekend.
The first round is expected to arrive early Thursday morning, with a fairly brief risk of freezing rain before temperatures quickly rise and everything changes over to rain.
“It’s not a major storm,” Gregoire said. But with the threat of freezing rain coinciding with the morning rush, “the timing is bad.”
Temperatures will spike to the midteens Thursday before dropping just as quickly back to the freezing mark overnight. The mercury is only expected to climb to 4 C Friday with a 60 per cent chance of rain, a precursor to the main event arriving Saturday.
“This one will pull a lot of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and really push all this
moisture up towards the Great Lakes basin,” Gregoire said. “It’s going to really slow down over the Great Lakes.”
While the exact track of the system still remains to be seen, Gregoire believes that Waterloo Region will be right on the dividing line between rain and freezing rain on Saturday and Sunday.
“I believe ... that threat of freezing rain will be generally shortlived, and if it occurs — with the temperature so close to the freezing mark — it’s not going to be the freezing rain storm that you’d see in January.”
That’s not the case for areas just a bit further north and east, where the threat for as much as 20 mm of ice accretion exists. “Kitchener-Waterloo would not be in that bull’s eye for the heavy ice accretion,” Gregoire said.
Areas even further north and east, through the Bruce Peninsula, cottage country and Algonquin Park, could see more than 15 cm of snow. Southwestern Ontario will likely see a good soaking, with the potential for more than 50 mm of rain in some areas.
“It’s quite the mix in a fairly compact area,” Gregoire said. High temperatures in Waterloo Region are expected to hover just above the freezing mark all weekend.
April can be unpredictable, and these types of systems packing all kinds of precipitation aren’t all that unusual early in the month.
“But when you get to the middle of April, especially for southwestern Ontario, it’s not what I would call common,” said Gregoire. “By mid-April, we should be pretty well done with these types of storms.”