Another storm system is getting organized in the American midwest and will be tracking into Minnesota by Tuesday bringing another round of snow to southern Manitoba to begin the new year. Snow from this system is expected to spread into southern Manitoba during Monday, and become heavier Monday night into early Tuesday before tapering off. Snowfall amounts will range from about 5-10 cm in the Winnipeg area to 20 cm over the southern RRV into SE Manitoba by Tuesday evening. This system is not expected to be as intense as the Christmas Day/Boxing day storm which brought heavy snow and blizzard conditions to much of southern Manitoba including Winnipeg. However, snow and increasing winds will make for difficult travel conditions later Monday through Monday night into Tuesday morning especially over southern RRV and SE MB. Heavier snow of 20-30 cm is possible south of the US border in northern ND and northern Minnesota as well as NW Ontario. Be prepared for poor travel conditions and possible roads closures if you plan on travelling south or east of Winnipeg Monday into Tuesday.
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Snowfall amounts (in inches) forecast by NAM model through
Tuesday evening. Heaviest amounts expected S and E of Winnipeg |
This system comes on the heels of the snowiest calendar month in Winnipeg in almost 60 years. Winnipeg saw 68.8 cm of snow in December, 3 times the normal snowfall for December (23 cm) and the snowiest month in the city since Nov 1958 when 77 cm of snow fell. The snowfall has wiped out the city's snow clearing budget, which was at a surplus heading into December given last year's tame winter and this year's mild fall. The city ended up spending $39 million on street clearing operations in December, $11 million more than budgeted.
Is the combination of A swing from or to a major ENSO state to the opposite state and a swing in the bidecadal PDO producing these weather/ climate results.
ReplyDeletePut another way are we repeating the 95-96-97 weather/climate- atmospheric conditions.
Tough to say Jim.. would have to do an extensive correlation analysis between ENSO/PDO cycles and precip trends. Might have some contribution, but I don't think we can say there's a direct correlation.. atmosphere is too complex with so many variables that lead to interannual precip variability.
DeleteIf the answer to the above is yes does that make for more seasonal predictability of pcpn.
ReplyDeleteThanks rob There used to be a chart of those correlations about twenty years ago of year and ENSO state and positive and negative PDO ...Rutgers i think. Remember seeing it between 96 and 97 . Have to check my really old mac ibook 2001 or emac 2003 which still runs both 0sx 10xx and 9.2.1 ....might have kept it. I knew they had other uses than bookends and paperweights
ReplyDeleteRob Is this accurate? Perhaps you could refer him/her to Jjc juliens records for storms and your Blog to complete their education
ReplyDeleteFree press last week "Although it feels like there has been unusually harsh winter weather in the past few weeks, including three storms in December, Environment Canada meterologist Natalie Hasell said that may just be a perception because last winter was an El Nino, which typically leads to warmer conditions and fewer storms"
"We have the impression that there's lots of storms right now," Hasell said, noting that there's not a measurement for what would be an average number of winter storms. "Because last year was so quiet by comparison, it's easy to have that impression.
"We've been hammered by this kind of stuff before."
It's true it isn't unusual to have this many systems (the past two winters have been dry and quiet compared to normal so there would be some perception issue). We reached 2nd snowiest December mainly as a result of two single events.
DeleteWhat was unusual: To get two major Colorado Lows with 25+ cm of snow in a single month was certainly not common place with only a handful of such examples in the past 145 years (only found 2 to 4 such examples in Winnipeg before 2016 - Jan 1916, Nov 1958 and possibly Dec 1909 and Feb 1881 (I can't say for sure for this these two months because it's hard to seperate out events without hourly data or seeing some maps) (stat not necessarily applicable to all of Manitoba and I didn't look at 30-day periods, only single calendar months)). That's as far as I've researched so far. Definitely need further research on this topic. Any additional thoughts Rob?
No, you pretty much summed it up Julien. It was the rarity of having two big storms (25+ cm) in the same month that propelled Dec 2016 to top 10 snowiest month honours.
DeleteCertainly compared to last winter, it seems a lot stormier. Other than a snowy week before Christmas 2015 (40 cm from Dec 15-22), we really didn't have many significant snowfall events last winter. The deepest snowcover I had last year was 35 cm in early March.. we're already up to 45 cm in early January with 2-3 more months of accumulating snow to go. Hopefully we don't add too much more to that the rest of the winter.. but we'll have to see what Mother Nature has in store for us.
Clipper system forecast to track across the interlake overnight into NW Ontario Thursday. May bring some light snow overnight for us, but the main issue will be the gusty NW winds developing Thursday morning behind the clipper drawing in colder air. NW winds of 40 km/h gusting 60-70 by late morning, diminishing to 30 km/h by mid to late afternoon then 20 or less b evening. Temps will be falling from around -20C at sunrise to -23C by midday and -27C by 6 pm. Windchills near -40 developing by noon and staying near that mark the rest of the day (forecast windchill of -44 for tomorrow looks too low. Temps will be falling through the afternoon but winds will also be decreasing as well)
ReplyDeleteHey Rob, another storm for next weekend? Jan 21, 22.
ReplyDeleteI know its a ways out but last time it was predicted it actually happened. Is this just one model showing this?
Hey rob. You said snowcover was at 45cm by Jan 1st. We've had 2 systems since then. What would you say the snowpack is at now? My guess is 60cm but what is your official measurement?
ReplyDeleteAlso will we lose some of it with the warm temps next week.
My snowdepth went up to 54 cm on Jan 10th following that 12 cm of very fluffy snow that fell on the 9th into early on the 10th. It went down to 50 cm by this morning, then today's wild winds blew away all that fluffy snow from the 9-10th, so my snowdepth is down to 42 cm as of late today.
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