A weekend warm up and what to expect in March

This week's cold snap seems to be leaving our area as quickly as it hit, as it looks to be warming up significantly this weekend.

Meteorologist with Environment Canada Brian Proctor explained the short-lived deep freeze was thanks to some freezing arctic winds.

"It's a really intense arctic vortex, the lows that are always present in the Hudson's Bay area is very strong and very intense. This brought a lot of cold air down across the pole, down through the NWT (North West Territories), down through Alberta and slammed into much of southern Canada at this point in time."

As for the sudden warm-up, Proctor noted that we should be making our way back to more seasonal temperatures starting this weekend.

"We're starting to see a little bit of a westerly breakthrough forecast across British Columbia and in Alberta on the weekend start to push those temperatures back up and shove that arctic air further back off to the northeast."

Typically this time of year Proctor says we can see highs of zero during the day and overnight lows around -11°C. Looking ahead to the weekend he said we should see those more seasonal temperatures make a reappearance.

"As we start moving into the end of the month for the 28 and 29 we still might cool off a little bit again in there, sort of just below seasonal values, but generally it looks to be much more seasonal as we move into the first part of March."

Proctor did say that although it will be warming up this weekend that we should not expect Chinook like conditions.  

Looking ahead in the Month of March Proctor did note that March may be cooler than normal for the seasonal average. That doesn't necessarily mean we will see much snow, but as we do get cooler Proctor explained that it could be a possibility to get another dump of snow. 

"The important things for people to remember is that March and April's snowfalls are really important from a water resource point of view and from an agricultural and forest fire point of view, we need that moisture to help us exacerbate any sort of drought problems as we move into the spring."

Proctor did say that although we are still expecting extreme cold temperatures that we shouldn't see much more snow to go along with it. 

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