Weather

The weather continues to bring surprises. Welcome to Canada!

So far, the weather this summer in Ontario has been on the cool and wet side. All of June and July were either rainy or cooler than the seasonal average.

Well, this week, we saw the first day with above freezing temperature in more than month. Last Tuesday, there was a bit of a thaw, and slush formed. Overnight, it froze again, making for a lot of slippery ice.We also had some freezing rain, which forms when a relatively shallow layer of cold air is above the ground, and rain falling through it is still in the liquid state, but as soon as it hits a surface, it freezes, causing a layer of ice on everything. This can be very tricky driving on.Ice pellets have also occurred twice in the last week or so.

As I write this, we are being hammered with a major snow storm. Temperature is not the issue, but rather the high wind with lots of snow.CBC had the following to say in the main story on their front page for Ontario:

• A major snowstorm swept across the southern part of the province, and was expected to dump between 15 and 30 centimetres of snow by Tuesday night.

Yesterday, it was a complete white out while going home. A slow and dangerous drive. I had to cancel an appointment, because I did not feel like going out again in this weather.By late evening, the driveway was completely covered with snow about 20 cm deep, and more in certain places, because it was very windy, and snow was blowing around.I shovelled for about 40 minutes, knowing that I will have to do it all over again in the morning. I was so tired when I was done, and so over heated. The house felt like an oven when I went in.This morning, I had to shovel all of it again. Then go and take a shower to wash all the sweat!

Well, the deep freeze cold snap is gone, but today I was surprised to see how much snow was on the drive way! At 3 pm, there was just some snow blowing around. At 9 pm, when we went out to shovel it, there was like 30 cm accumulated! The forecast was only for 5 cm, but this is usually the case (on my drive way, there is 4-5X what the forecast said). Even our neighbor across the street was asking her son : "When did all this snow fall!". Quite surprising.As for the cold snap, even long time Canadians complained that it was cold!More snow is forecast for the next few days, and then another cold snap is expected mid week!