Time to look ahead to winter
and what we might expect from it this year. There’s bad news and more bad news.
Sorry about that but this is
Canada, the country that has the world’s lowest average daily temperature –
minus 5.6 Celsius.
Also, we have the world’s
second coldest national capital. Ottawa ranks second in cold only to
Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia.
So news of a cold and snowy winter ahead should not
shock.
The Weather Network has
given us a sneak preview of its 2018-19 winter forecast. Ontario, it says, will
have a winter much like last year with bitter spells followed by significant
periods of milder weather.
That sounds like more
miserable patches of freezing rain conditions that last winter brought us
not-so-great skiing, not so great sledding, much tense driving on icy roads and
left us yearning for a real good old-fashioned Ontario winter.
A good old-fashioned winter
is exactly what North America’s two best-known, old-fashioned weather predictors
are predicting for us.
“Very, very cold,” says The
Farmers’ Almanac. And, above normal snowfall.
Colder than normal and
snowier than normal for all of Canada, says The Old Farmer’s Almanac.
Just so not to be confused
there are two Farmers Almanacs. One is The Old Farmer’s Almanac of New
Hampshire established in 1792. The other is The Farmers’ Almanac (minus the
Old) established in 1818 in New Jersey. (Note the different placements of the
apostrophe).
Both claim prediction accuracy
rates in the 80 percent range. However, professional weather people usually
raise an eyebrow when hearing weather prognostications from the almanacs.
The almanacs have formulas
for predicting weather but these are closely guarded secrets. They apparently
are based on magnetic storms on the sun and other such astrological events.
The Old Farmer’s Almanac
keeps its secret formula in a black box at its offices. The secret formula of
The Farmers’ Almanac is known only to someone named Caleb Weatherbee, which we
assume is a pseudonym.
Meanwhile there is much talk
about how climate change is disturbing weather patterns and making precise
weather forecasting difficult. The world has seen a lot of unexpected weather
events over the past year or so.
The Florida Panhandle,
devastated last week by Hurricane Michael, saw snowflakes last January. The
State of Georgia had 15 centimetres of snow about the same time.
It snowed in the Sahara
Desert last January and in February dozens of people died in a cold snap in the
UK, Ireland and parts of Europe. It also snowed in Rome in February and at the
end of June in Newfoundland.
Last April was the coldest
in 124 years in a couple parts of the U.S. and it certainly wasn’t much warmer
in Canada. The average high temperature in Haliburton County last April was 5.9
Celsius. The warmest it got that month was 17.5 Celsius.
That was followed by a warm
May and an unusually warm and dry summer. The average high temperature for May
in Haliburton was 22.1 Celsius.
Weather ups and downs likely
will be a prominent feature for the future.
There is plenty of argument
about whether global warming is causing all the changes. But extreme weather
events are nothing new, although there seem to be more of them these days.
One thing to watch is Arctic
ice cover, which is shrinking every year. It doesn’t matter whether you believe
it is happening naturally or caused by human-produced global warming. It is
happening and there is little doubt it is affecting world weather.
In the last 40 years the
Canadian Arctic has lost 40 per cent or more of its ice cover. When ice melts
it exposes dark waters.
Scientists say that Arctic
ice and snow reflects about 80 per cent of the sun’s radiation. Dark water reflects only 20 per cent.
Less ice and snow reflecting
the sun’s rays exposes dark waters that absorb the sun’s rays and therefore
become warmer. More water warming means more ice melting exposing more warming
waters.
That’s a cycle that you
don’t have to be a scientist to understand.
Meanwhile, northwestern
Ontario already has received its first dumpings of snow. Looking at the 14-day
forecast, ours could be only days, or hours, away.
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