Spring 2014 has gotten off on the completely wrong foot in Saskatchewan. Typically, the Regina area is expected to be seeing highs upwards of 3 degrees Celsius, but instead, cold air has it’s grip on the province yet again. Windchills have reached close to -30C in some areas over the last two days, and not much relief is expected until March 26th. This comes after a week or two of what seemed to be pre-Spring weather conditions gave way to intense melting and slushy conditions in many areas. Those temperatures only put a dent in the current snow accumulation that is on the ground in the province.While more cold is not what the people in the province want to hear after an already brutal winter filled with extreme coldsnaps and windchills, the best hope to cling on to may come in the form of the calendar. From March 21st to March 28th, 2013, the highest recorded temperature was -4.7C. That whole week in 2013 consisted of daytime highs which are not far off from the forecasted highs for the upcoming 2014 version of this week. Why is this significant? The days following this week in 2013, there were very minimal days in the month of April in which the daytime highs went any lower than -3C.
This is not to provide hope, but simply to provide the fact that going against historical data within very recent years alone, it is not reasonable to expect extremely warm temperatures in SK for the rest of March, particularly when compared against the set average high of 3C for this time of year. Because anyone from SK will tell you, weather in SK is rarely ever just “average”.
