Although everyone in the southeast is aware of the storm, one organization couldn’t see much because of a blackout.
Environment Canada was there to monitor the storm that passed last week, but it ran into some difficulties this weekend, as heavy rains, snow, and strong winds swept across the region.
All that rain and snow came with warmer temperatures, which caused infrastructure to fail and eventually lead to outages.
Terri Lang, Environment Canada Meteorologist says one of those items was their monitoring devices.
“We don’t really know. We have no observation except Maryfield, which is near the Manitoba border. 33 centimeters is the closest we got from them. However, we haven’t received any weather observations. The automatic meteor station and the other Nav Canada stations are offline so we don’t know the information.
They can’t even confirm the wind speeds during the storm, but Lang said they were likely close to the forecasted 80-90 km/hr mark.
They won’t be able to estimate snowfall because of the outages. Even if power was restored, wind would have likely affected any snow measurement devices.
“It is affected due to the power outage, however, there aren’t snowfall measurements from those two weather stations so we don’t know. Even if we had the observation that could tell us how many precipitations fell, that would only be the melted snow or rain. It would provide an estimate of snow depth but it’s just a laser pointed down. If the winds were blowing as they were, we wouldn’t know how much snow fell.
Lang said that even though no exact data was available from the stations Lang believes the storm behaved as they expected.
“Certainly it turned out as predicted by the weather models. We knew that temperatures could fluctuate between snow or rain, and that it would eventually turn to that very wet snow. It was so cold that the temperature hovered around freezing for quite some time. The snow had a high water content, and it was sticky enough to stick to power lines and other electrical equipment.
Lang reminds people that they can help Environment Canada after a storm by tweeting local information using the hashtag #SKStorm