A blanket of snow is already covering most of southwest Saskatchewan as a spring snowfall hits the area.
“We have a bit of a late season snowfall event that’s currently impacting southern Saskatchewan,” said Environment and Climate Change Canada Meteorologist Rose Carlsen. “We expect it to continue overnight and most of the day, and then into the overnight period, with some areas in Saskatchewan still seeing a kind of a tapering off towards Tuesday morning.”
Unpredictable totals
The time of year makes it a bit tougher to predict the amount of snow and where the heart of the storm could be.
“We’re expecting generally 5 to 10 centimetres of snow over kind of the southern portions of Saskatchewan,” Carlsen said. “There’s a chance for a heavier band kind of embedded in there. Maybe closer to like 10 to 15 centimetres of snow through kind of like the Moose Jaw, Regina area.
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“There has been, unfortunately, a fair bit of uncertainty with the location of where this heaviest band of snow is going to be. That kind of comes hand-in-hand with these late season events. They don’t quite typically follow our normal snowfall pattern scenarios that we expect in the middle of winter, just because the sun angle is so much more different that increases a lot of uncertainty in kind of the temperature profiles in the lower parts of the atmosphere.”
More southern area spared
The snow may not hit the southern portion of the region quite as much.
“They’re still kind of going to be a little bit closer to the warmer air where they’re going to see mostly just maybe like a rain-snow mix,” Carlsen said. “Not quite as much accumulating snow as the areas farther north.”
She explained the trend that caused a drop of snow this late in the season.Â
“Right now, we do have a little bit more of a troughing pattern over the western Canada, which allows a little bit cooler air coming from farther north down into kind of the southern reaches,” Carlsen said. “That kind of is what allows for the rather large amplification of temperature swings around these shoulder season events, where we can have a fair bit of like warming followed by a fair bit of cooling and rebound just like that.”
Warming some by Wednesday
She expects that snow to stick around until mid-week.Â
“We’re looking at a little bit of a cooler period,” Carlsen noted. “I would expect probably snow melt to probably start to activate a little bit more towards midweek. We have a little bit higher temperatures in the forecast and this the sun angle actually plays a fair bit in snow melt this this time of year. Because the sun is a lot higher in the sky it has much more of an impact even if the surface temperatures are a little bit closer to zero.”
Environment and Climate Change Canada have issued a special weather statement about the snowfall.