It’s time to break out the golf clubs and sunglasses and rev up the annual daffodil counts.
Hot on the heels of an unseasonably balmy West Coast winter, the prediction for spring is more of the same.
Meteorologists are predicting spring weather that is warmer and drier than usual.
A large scale ridge of high pressure that’s been sitting over the West Coast for most of the winter, sending winter storms packing, is likely to remain there, said Lisa Coldwells, a meteorologist from Environment Canada.
“It’s like a big giant bubble,” she said. “It deflects all the weather systems from the Pacific.
“It does look like Western Canada will stay in the above normal temperature regime,” she said.
A very warm pool of water in the Pacific Ocean that recurs once every 10 years is adding to the warm-and-dry trend, she said.
Looking at mean temperatures, the months of December to February made up the second-warmest winter on record, said Coldwells, with a mean temperature of 6.1 degrees at Vancouver International Airport — two degrees warmer than usual. (The warmest winter was in 1957.)
At the other side of the country, Eastern Canada found itself facing the opposite condition — a broad scale weather trough. “It allows all the cold Arctic air to descend into it,” said Coldwells — with predictably chilly results.
But enough about them.
On the West Coast, the same amount of rain fell as usual this winter, said Coldwells, but it may not have felt that way because most of that tended to come in concentrated deluges.
“We did tend to get most of our precipitation during these subtropical Pineapple Express events,” she said.
Certainly for the last half of February, “the tap was turned off,” she said.
Precipitation is more difficult to predict than temperature, but both Coldwells and Elena Lappo, meteorologist for the Weather Network, are putting their money on a drier than normal spring.
Lappo said March may still bring some potential for snow higher in the mountains. “The higher you are, the better chance you have.” But the chance of a freak dump of snow close to the North Shore is remote.
“We’re probably not going to see any more snow for Vancouver itself,” said Lappo.
