It's going to be a while before sledding enthusiasts can throw themselves down a snowy hill in Nova Scotia's capital region.
According to Cindy Day, SaltWire Network's chief meteorologist, it's going to be mild through the weekend, with rain Saturday night into Sunday. Temperatures will be around 6 or 7 C.
“The earliest possibility – I've been keeping an eye on this system – it's an offshore system that will definitely bring snow to Newfoundland. … It's almost a week away,” Day said on Wednesday. “It may come close enough to the coast, depending on its exact track. That's, I guess, our earliest possible snow event, would be Tuesday into Wednesday, but it may stay off the coast.”
By then, it will definitely be cold enough for snow, Day added.
“There's no scenario where it will be rain,” she said.
“It's going to be very cold Tuesday and Wednesday, (with) significant wind chill. But should that system back in and hug the coast a little more than it seems to want to track right now, it would become a snow event for Nova Scotia as well as Newfoundland and Labrador. But right now it looks like a good snow event east of us, at least.”
According to the website funboy.com, the best sledding conditions require five to 10 centimetres of snow over the whole course of the hill. You don't want bare patches of ground or vegetation poking through. It's also not good – or safe – if the snow has turned to ice. That's a recipe for injuries.
The blog suggests that for sledding, you want heavy, sticky, wet snow like the kind that makes the best snowballs, because there's moisture for the weight of the tube, plastic sled or toboggan to create a micro-layer of water on the surface, meaning it's easier to get more speed. Lighter, powdery snow won't be the best, unless you pack it down.
Day said when conditions change this month, “they really will change.”
“The jet stream has really been slow to transition, so the systems have been tracking either north of us, where we get nothing, or close enough to us that we get the rain and the mild temperature. So, that jet stream is going to start to sag southward and I think by the end of January, we're going to start to see systems tracking through with snow each time, and colder temperatures, and we're going to settle into more of a wintry pattern.”
The meteorologist said things could end up similar to the winter of 2015, when significant snowfall didn't arrive until February, but once it did, it came with a vengeance. March 18, 2015 saw 48 cm of snow in one day and the Halifax Stanfield International Airport recorded more than 130 cm in February of that year.
“It's going to be similar, I think, to what we're going to see this year,” Day said.
“People are saying it's been such an easy winter, and it has been. If you look at it, we're about half-way through meteorological winter. Meteorological winter is December, January, February, so by Jan. 15, which is Friday, we are half-way through meteorological winter, so in the grand scheme of things, it's been very easy so far, but things could change – and likely will – very quickly.”
