The forecast was right — south-central and southeastern Manitoba is waking up to a fresh coat of snow.
The first few hours of a springtime Colorado low has resulted in around six centimetres of snow measured at Winnipeg’s airport, while preliminary numbers from Environment Canada say areas to the east, like Steinbach, are dealing with around 15 cm.
Snow is expected to continue falling throughout the day, accompanied by winds gusting up to 60 km/h.
Environment Canada meteorologist Rose Carlsen told 680 CJOB’s The Start that there’s a plus side to the significant winds — they’ll help push the storm along.
“It’s going to be pretty steady — it’s not going to be a hard jump up. It’s going to be a pretty even increase of the winds,” she said.
“We do have a system of high pressure building in through tomorrow. As the system pulls out, it should be clearing up fairly quickly throughout tomorrow.”
Carlsen said there’s a significant pattern change ahead, although it’s too early to say definitively whether the post-storm temperatures will be as warm — in the mid-teens — as initially predicted.
“Sometimes when you get far into the long range you have a significant event like this that’s maybe a little bit more outside the normal realm of possibility, you can get some numbers in the long range that are not maybe representative of what’s actually going to happen,” she said.
“We are expecting a warm-up, but it might not be quite up to the 14-15 (degrees) that’s in the forecast”
Winnipeg is expected to see a high of -5 C Wednesday while the city — and most of southern Manitoba in the eastern half of the province — remains under a winter storm warning.
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