Brown Christmas in store for Halifax
Posted Dec 22, 2015 07:20:08 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Don’t expect Old Man Winter to give the gift of a white Christmas.
NEWS 95.7 meteorologist Richard Zurawski says cool temperatures are not in the forecast for Friday.
“In Halifax and most of the Maritimes, most of eastern Canada going all the way to places like Thunder Bay, it is most likely going to be a brown Christmas,” he said. “Daytime highs will be hovering between 8 and 13 degrees.”
The Weather Network adds they only expect half of Canadians to wake up to the white stuff, in what chief meteorologist Chris Scott calls ‘a tale of two seasons.’
While most of Canada’s land mass will be blanketed in the requisite two centimetres of snow to reach white Christmas status, “you can pretty much divide the population right down the middle,” Chris Scott said, explaining that most of Canada’s major cities will be green on Christmas Day.
But from northern Ontario to British Columbia, it’s a different story, he said. In those regions – excluding Vancouver and Victoria – the ground will be snowy.
“Most of these places that have snow on the ground won’t actually have snow falling, so travelling to friends and family will be pretty easy,” he added. “Any more tricky travel would be well to the North: northern Ontario, northern Quebec and Labrador.”
But, he said, there shouldn’t be any “big-ticket storms” on Christmas Day.
Zurawski said El Nino is to blame for the unseasonably warm weather.
“We’re starting to notice a warming right across the Atlantic seaboard, and that’s traditionally what happens with a very strong El Nino,” he explained. “That has an influence on our weather.”
However, as we officially ring in the first day of winter, Zurawski reminds us we haven’t yet hit the coolest part of the year.
“As we get into the very coldest part on the winter sometime in January and February, the temperatures will bottom out,” he said. “So even though they’ll be warmer than normal, they’ll still be cold enough to give us some snow.”
