Peter Finlayson, Ormstown Weatherman
A mini heatwave blew into town in the middle of the past week with the daytime high reaching +17 °C on Thursday. The snow depth shrunk from 33 cm down to 6 cm (average) or less overnight with big bare patches in many fields and the culverts and tile drains started to run at full capacity and even overflow.
An interesting comparison is that Montreal only reached +10 °C on the same day and the snow depth on and around the island of Montreal is, as a consequence, still much deeper.
The warm weather brought the average temperature so far this month up to -3.9 °C (last week was -7.1 °C) while the normal for the month of March is -1.4 °C. What’s left of the ice on the Chateauguay River is between 1–2 feet thick and seems to be mostly disintegrating in place rather than breaking up into big chunks and then blocking up the dams and narrows.
Despite everything being soaking wet from the melting snow, there was very little precipitation during the past week, only 4 mm of rain and 1 cm of snow for total precipitation of 4.6 mm. That brings the total for the month so far to only 9 mm of precipitation which is only 20% of normal with hardly any rain or snow forecast until the very last days of the month. Given that there appears to be little frost in the ground, the signs are all pointing towards an early spring in the fields.
The beginning of this coming week will be on the cool side but then normal temperatures will resume with lots of sunshine which should be perfect weather for the maple sap to run.
Other signs that spring is imminent are a few blackbirds have been spotted here and there and the geese started arriving en masse late in the week – how do they know that the snow is going to melt so they have a nice flat corn field in which to rest and have a snack. They must have made some last-minute bookings for all of those empty seats on Air Canada…