Southern Manitoba is busy cleaning up from the wallop Monday’s storm dealt with some communities digging out from under 50+cm of snow. Unfortunately, while temperatures will remain quite pleasant, another shot of snow is on the way later this week but with much less snow for most areas.
The Rest of the Week
Mainly sunny.
-5°C / -13°C
Increasing cloud. Snow beginning in the afternoon. Generally 3-5cm.
-4°C / -8°C
A few flurries ending in the morning then gradual clearing.
-4°C / -9°C
We’ll see a beautiful day today with mainly sunny skies and a high temperature near –5°C. Skies will remain clear tonight as the temperature dips down to –13°C. For Thursday, we’ll see increasing cloud through the morning with light snow pushing into the Red River Valley through midday and the early afternoon. Temperatures will climb to around –4°C and we should see a couple cm or so during the day. Snow will continue through Thursday night giving another 2–4cm accumulation as temperatures dip to about –8°C. On Friday, skies will clear through the day with any lingering snow clearing out early in the morning. Temperatures should reach around –4°C again.
Total snowfall from this system should sit around 3–5cm for much of the Red River Valley, however there are numerous indications that there may be some enhanced snowfall just along and north of the low track due to enhanced instability north of the warmer air. This sort of enhancement is very sensitive to environmental conditions and can often also be extremely limited in extent, but at this point it looks like somewhere just north of the Trans-Canada Highway and Winnipeg may see closer to 7–10cm of snow from this system. I’m feeling like a broken record, but once again Winnipeg will rest right near the edge of the heaviest snowfall, and it could end up being quite a snowy night on Thursday night if this system tracks a little further south. We’ll have updates in the comments below, naturally.
The Extended Outlook
A fairly pleasant pattern is expected to set up over the weekend bringing a more zonal flow to the Prairies. This should bring in some very mild air with daytime highs climbing to 0°C by the end of the weekend. The downside to the situation is that, in contrast to the sunny skies called for by the current Environment Canada forecast, with all the snow we’ve had combined with the strengthening sun and warm temperatures, we could easily end up socked in with fog patches and stratus due to the abundant melting and strong inversion. So despite the rather optimistic outlook, there’s a chance that it could end up just sort of gloomy, damp and chilly. Here’s hoping that we can keep up enough mixing to keep the skies clear and we can enjoy an extremely pleasant start to next week!
