Lake Manitoba ranchers fear another year of losses

  The flood waters have receded, but residents along the shore of Lake Manitoba are still dealing with the damage they caused. Flooded fields, clogged drains, downed fences, and cattail-filled pastures where now only seagulls graze are common sights. Langruth-area farmer Jonas Johnson and his wife Lydia live in a 94-year-old house about half a

Looking at severe summer weather

Usually around this time of the year my mind turns to summer and summer weather. In particular, I start to think about thunderstorms and severe summer weather. This year, with the summer-in-March weather pattern, we saw some really early thunderstorms, but with the cooler April weather pattern things have settled down. Now, I don’t want


High pressure to dominate this week

For most of this forecast period it looks like our weather will be dominated by high pressure. This will result in dry conditions, with temperatures starting out on the cool side and slowly warming to around average for this time of the year. A deepening area of low pressure over Eastern Canada will help an

Active thunderstorm season?

Sometimes I’m as quick as the next person to jump all over weather forecasters when they’re way off the mark. It’s easy for us to notice when a forecast is wrong, but we rarely notice how often they are right. A lot of people are also quick to say how weather forecasting hasn’t really gotten


Average spring weather

This forecast period will start with us seeing a predominantly westerly flow. To our north there will be an area of high pressure, while to our south we’ll see several weak areas of low pressure moving by within the westerly flow. This makes the first part of the forecast period a little tough to figure

Short warming, then cooler

After a fairly cold start to the week it looks like our weather will return to warmer conditions. The big question is whether we will see any precipitation. The cold arctic air mass that moved in late last weekend, behind the storm system that brought some significant snow to parts of Saskatchewan and northern Manitoba,


Link builds between weather extremes and warming

Extreme rainfall, heat waves and increased pollen-induced allergies are to be expected as climate change unfolds

Reuters / Extreme weather events over the past decade have increased and were “very likely” caused by man-made global warming, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change said March 25. Scientists at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Research used physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations to link extreme rainfall and heat waves to global

How ice loss influences the jet stream

I’ve spent a fair bit of time discussing the record warm weather we experienced in March over the last few weeks. We’ve looked at just what led to this remarkable weather and we discussed just how intense it really was. The fact that we saw temperatures that were between three and four standard deviations above


Will we see a warm spring… or payback?

The historic warm spell that has now gone on since last July continued in March. Actually, it didn’t just continue in March — it might have peaked in intensity. If this March isn’t the peak in intensity for this prolonged warm spell, I’m getting a little nervous about just how hot things might get in

Warm, then cooling trend

It looks like this forecast period will start off a little quieter than last week. After seeing several lows pass through our region over the last week bringing more clouds than sun, plenty of showers, rain and even a little snow, it looks as if a ridge of high pressure will build in during this