Warm spell hits Saskatchewan, but winter isn’t over: Environment Canada

Saskatchewan’s winter cold has loosened its grip as temperatures climb toward the freezing mark, but experts warn that the mild stretch doesn’t mean the season is over – and the slush, fog, and freeze-thaw cycle could make conditions more dangerous, not less.

“Here are three winter weeks that didn’t happen this year,” said David Phillips, a senior climatologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, as he spoke on 980 CJME and 650 CKOM’s The Evan Bray Show. “The cold will return. But I say the cool will return, but not the cold.”

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Phillips said the province had already experienced a notable break in January, followed by another longer stretch of mild Pacific air replacing the harsher Arctic pattern many people associate with mid winter.

“It may be false spring, but it has to be delightful to people,” he said. “There were five or six days where temperatures in Battleford got up to six, and Regina up four, and Saskatoon about five.”

Phillips said the mild spell could persist into mid February.

“This one’s longer, maybe almost a week and a half, two weeks,” he said. “I don’t see it ending until perhaps Valentine’s Day.”

While Phillips acknowledged winter weather would return, he said he expected less sustained, punishing cold than Saskatchewan residents often brace for.

“One thing about when you get winter coming back, and surely it will, it could be two days, not two weeks,” he said. “We still have cold weather in this country, but we’re going to see less cold, less extreme cold.”

The warmth, Phillips added, also came with a more immediate problem: when temperatures hover near zero, conditions can shift quickly and sometimes turn ugly.

“When you get that temperature near the freezing mark, a lot of things can happen,” he said. “It’s not necessarily a good thing. You get a little bit of melting, but then you get that fog, and you can get that freezing that ice on the surfaces.”

Host Brent Loucks described exactly that kind of mixed-bag drive across the Prairies, telling Phillips he had travelled from Brandon, Man., through Regina and up to Saskatoon and had seen rapid changes along the way.

“I think I saw just about every type of weather,” Loucks said. “I had thick fog, near-zero visibility and blowing snow, and then beautiful sunshine and warmer temperatures.”

Loucks also pointed to recent freezing rain and rough travel conditions, saying, “It was terrible last week with the freezing rain we had,” and adding that highway conditions “were just horrible this last Saturday.”

Phillips said that variability, not just raw temperature, was one of the biggest changes people notice when comparing winters now to those they remember.

“That’s really what the difference is, what old timers say about what the winters were like and what they say now,” Phillips said.

He pointed to a “parade” of fast-moving systems earlier in the season, the kind that can bring quick hits of snow and wind, followed by sharp temperature swings.

“We saw this year a lot of Alberta Clippers,” he said. “They came in very quickly, windy events, a shot of snow and then the cold air behind them.”

Phillips said those systems seemed to arrive more frequently than in some winters, “instead of maybe one a week,” sometimes coming “every two or three days.”

Even with the mild air in play, Phillips stressed Saskatchewan still had plenty of winter left to deliver snow and he said the calendar backed that up.

“In February, on average, February and then March, April, May, you get about 35 to 40 per cent of your annual snowfall,” he said. “So you still got some shovelling, plowing and pushing to do.”

Phillips said the province was also at a point in the season when the sunlight itself starts to feel different, not warm like spring, but noticeable enough.

“We’re well beyond the halfway point of winter,” he said. “The days are getting longer, the angle of the sun, you can actually feel the warmth on your skin in February, not in January, but in February.”

Still, Phillips said Saskatchewan needed more moisture, especially in the southwest.

“We need some more precipitation, particularly in the southwestern part of the province,” he said. “That will certainly come, probably with the snow and the rain.”

And while rain in early February might sound out of place, Phillips said the mix of precipitation types was part of what made this pattern stand out.

“My gosh, to talk about rain on February the fifth,” he said. “We even have a warning out for freezing rain up in the northwest part of the province.”

Loucks asked Phillips if this kind of winter, bouncing between melting, freezing and blowing snow, was becoming the norm.

Phillips said Canada was “a warmer country now” and that “winters aren’t what they used to be,” but he also cautioned against assuming cold weather was disappearing completely.

“We still have to worry about the other end of the thermometer,” he said. “We still have cold weather in this country.”

For now, Phillips said the mild stretch was a break and for many, a welcome one, but he framed it as a shift in how winter behaves, not a cancellation of winter itself.

“It helps to break up the duration of the cold that we sometimes expect,” he said.