A weather forecaster says our winter in the Quad Counties seemed longer than usual.
Winter officially ended March 20.
Dave Phillips, Environment Canada’s senior climatologist, tells The Hawk it wasn’t an unusual winter, but a short autumn made it feel longer than it actually was.
“We got sort of robbed of fall (in 2018)- we saw that October and November were kind of cooler than normal and snow started falling earlier, so people felt kind of short-ended,” he says. “It meant, really, that winter- the look and the feel of winter- started earlier.”
Phillips says it might have seemed colder than usual, but it wasn’t.
He says temperatures and precipitation were basically normal.
“From (a) precipitation point of view, from snowfall, (it was) normal to more than normal,” he says. “(You got) about 10-12 per cent more snow than you normally would get.”
Phillips says the winter weather likely isn’t behind us just yet, even with the official arrival of spring.
He says we typically get 25 more centimetres of snow- 15 per cent of our yearly total- after the first day of spring.
