By Sheldon Spackman

Red Deerians buried by up to 15 centimetres of snow over the weekend

Mar 5, 2018 | 4:02 PM

Red Deerians are looking forward to better weather this week after significant snowfall in the area over the weekend.

That brunt of the snow began to fall Friday and persisted through much of the day Saturday before gradually easing-off that evening.

“The amounts we’ve been able to get from Red Deer largely depended upon social media reports where somewhere around 11 up to 15 centimetres fell for the Red Deer area,” says Environment Canada Meteorologist Brian Proctor. “I would suggest we probably picked up another centimeter overnight Saturday into Sunday before the snow really ended in early to mid-morning time frame.”

Proctor anticipates another shot or two of snow before the winter comes to an end.

“We are now into what some people refer to as ‘Meteorlogic Spring’ which is an interesting sort of term,” explains Proctor. “We define that as the months of March, April and May and interestingly enough, that tends to be some of our heaviest snowfalls in the foothills and just off the foothills in Alberta. So while we have a nice forecast for the Red Deer area over the next seven days at this point in time, there’s a chance of something coming in again on the weekend, maybe a bit more snowfall.”

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He adds the seasonal forecast right now suggests our temperatures to be fairly ‘normal’ for the rest of the winter at this point.

“What we’re looking at is maybe a bit of a slow-start for March,” reveals Proctor. “Another sort of arctic out-break coming, maybe not to the large degree but sort of seeing these minus 20 overnight temperatures again later in March. Then sort of moderation as we move into April.”

In terms of precipitation, Proctor says the way the storm tracks have been this winter, we’ve seen fairly significant snowfalls along Alberta’s foothills and in communities just-off the foothills, a trend he expects to continue heading into April.

“For Red Deer, we’ve been fortunate when we compare ourselves to communities further to the south and to the west,” admits Proctor. “We haven’t seen the amount of snowfall that Calgary has or the number of days-of-snowfall that Calgary has at this point. So we can consider ourselves fortunate from that perspective and hopefully we’ll manage to hold that pattern a little bit longer and keep that snowfall a little bit below what we would normally expect.”