Arctic air to hang out in the West for the time being

The next two weeks will be quite cold across a large portion of western Canada with opportunities for some accumulating snow in the Vancouver area as snow levels will be very low at times. The main storm track in the west will be coming in from the northwest, which again favors these colder precipitation events, but these systems tend to move quickly and do not have a ton of moisture unlike the milder storms that come from the west and especially southwest.

The worst of the cold over the next 10 days will likely be concentrated over Alberta, which will result in high energy use.

Eventually, some of this cold will expand eastward into parts of eastern Canada during the last week of the month. In the meantime, any cold shots into southeastern Canada over the next two weeks will be brief with average temperatures running above normal for the period. Certainly not a great setup for ice rinks in Ontario.

There are some signals that the pattern may flip to a colder east, milder west sometime in February, but confidence is low at this point. More on that later as we get closer to February.

In the meantime, I am still concerned about a period of significant sleet and freezing rain across portions of Ontario and southern Quebec this weekend as a battle zone between abnormally warm air to the south and fresh cold air to the north sets up across eastern Canada. Right now, it looks like the worst of the ice may be from near Sarnia to just north of Toronto then up into Peterborough, Kingston, Ottawa, Montreal and New Brunswick Saturday into early Sunday with the potential for a significant buildup of ice. From Midland to north of Ottawa then up toward Quebec, this looks more like a snow/sleet storm.