It’s been a wild couple of days. We’ve broken an all time record temperature for February in Labrador (all sites). We’ve seen warm wind and rain absolutely chew up a historic snowfall from just over a week ago. We’ve seen more flooding from snow melt and runoff. We’ve seen a pretty significant flash freeze push through Labrador, with temperature falling from 3C to -18C in about 2 hours.
Unfortunately, this is probably mostly how winter will be moving forward. There’s too much warm air to our south now. The winter cold isn’t going anywhere, the sun doesn’t shine on the arctic for months. However, any time that cold is displaced (which usually happens multiple times every winter anyway), we’re going to see these huge swings from winter temps to spring temps. Again, this has always happened, but there’s a big difference between a couple of days of 0 to 5 C, and a couple of days of 10 to 15 C. The amount of snow that 10+ C and strong wind can melt is pretty incredible. The snow pack we had last week of about 100 cm should have lasted us well into April… about 80% of that melted in the last two days.
For winter loving folk like myself, this is a bit of a bummer, but I suppose I’ll just have to get used to enjoying winter in whatever short bursts it comes in. While it might seem like good news for the snow haters, keep in mind these huge swings come with other consequences. The amount of flooding we’re going to start seeing from snow melt and run off should increase. So it’s warmer temperatures with strings attached. So not saying you can’t enjoy it, but usually things are best in moderation, even temperature.
/end rant.