BLUES SKIES ON THE WAY
Cindy Day predicting warmer than average summer
Saltwire meteorologist Cindy Day predicts a good summer.
After enduring six weeks of relatively dismal weather, Cape Breton residents can finally see the sunlight at the end of the proverbial tunnel.
Well-known meteorologist and former television personality Cindy Day is predicting a warmer than average summer for the island and she’s giving the credit to the jet stream.
“Instead of the jet stream dipping down to the west of us, it’s now coming across the region, which means a little more heat,” said the official meteorologist of the Saltwire Network, the parent company of the Cape Breton Post.
For the record, jet streams are narrow bands of strong wind that move in the upper levels of the atmosphere and generally follow the invisible boundaries between hot and cold air.
“It’s not going to be a heatwave right away, but we’re going to get out of that cold flow where it gets down to below freezing at night, so we’re going to get out of that pattern,” said Day.
And, the change in the weather couldn’t come sooner for area residents, who have had plenty to complain about since the decent mid-spring weather gave false promise of a long, hot summer.
“We had a bit of a tease in late April and early May, when tulips and stuff seemed to come out, but we’ve been a holding pattern since then,” said Day, who predicted that Cape Breton should experience a high of around 22 C today.
“We are behind where we should be because the frost came two weeks after the average last frost date and the temperatures stayed very cool with record cold temperatures across Cape Breton and the rest of Nova Scotia for that matter — we’re about two weeks behind and the gardeners will tell you that, too.”
Although she’s a long-time meteorologist with plenty of experience, Day still likes to share the weather folklore passed on to her from her grandmother.
“Grandma always said that if there is a bit of a cool spring, then the summer will be fabulous, and I think she’s going to be right this year because the second half of June through the end of July should be warmer than normal and it will still be good through August,” she said.
“It looks like we’ve turned the corner right now just in time for the summer solstice on Thursday.”
And, while she sympathized with the Cape Breton residents who suffered through the recent spate of yucky weather, Day said things haven’t been much better on the mainland.
“We haven’t had much of a spring here in Halifax, either, maybe a bit better than Cape Breton, but not by a great deal — it’s been unseasonably cool and nasty.”