“A massive storm system” is headed southern Ontario’s way, starting midday Tuesday.
“It’s a massive storm system giving more winter-like conditions to portions of northern Ontario but almost spring-like conditions in southern Ontario,” said Environment Canada meteorologist Geoff Coulson, in an interview Monday.
The storm system is not only forecasted to spawn near record temperatures for southern Ontario — for instance, Pearson airport in Mississauga has 13 C forecasted for Tuesday and 15 C for Wednesday — but also widespread thunderstorms, which have the potential to be severe for a small portion of southern Ontario.
“It looks like the potential for the strong thunderstorms is probably going to remain down in extreme southwestern Ontario, more the Windsor, Essex County area,” he said.
He said it’s “relatively rare to be dealing with thunderstorms at this time of year. Normally, if there would be any thunder, it would be thunder snow … but in this case it is actual rain showers we’re dealing with, with the risk of thunderstorm activity.”
In a bit of déjà vu with last week, the mild spell that is predicted to culminate in the highs Wednesday will be abruptly ended by a short-lived Arctic blast for southern Ontario before yo-yoing back to mild, well in time for the weekend.
“Even though on Wednesday, we’ll have a mild start and we could, in fact, get up to 15 C by early afternoon on Wednesday, a sharp cold front then goes through right after that and we’ll see temperatures falling by late afternoon and evening to likely end up close to the freezing mark by evening, and then an overnight low into Thursday morning of -6 C.”
Thursday’s high out of Pearson is forecasted at -1 C, “a little colder than our normal high of plus-two for this time of year, Coulson said. “But the cold air doesn’t last, so by Friday we’re right back to above normal temperatures and in fact by Sunday we’re back to double digit high temperatures with a forecast high of 10 C.”
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And the mild weather looks like it will stick, at least as far as current long-range models are showing.
“It still looks pretty mild into the middle of next week and even beyond,” said Coulson. “There’s no real indication at this point of a return to the arctic cold that we’re expecting for Wednesday into Thursday, not to say that we won’t see it again but it looks like March is probably going to start off on the mild side and continue that way for the first little while.”
As for the storm system headed for us, he said we can expect a couple of different shots of precipitation for the GTA, “with the first one approaching around midday Tuesday in through Tuesday afternoon and then a second round of activity begins early Wednesday morning and continues through much of the day on Wednesday.”
This same system, he reiterated, “is going to be responsible for significant snowfalls in parts of northwestern and northeastern Ontario Tuesday into Wednesday and also potential Tuesday into Wednesday of freezing rain and ice pellets in parts of northeastern Ontario.”
