Canada Day snow looks to make an appearance in the West
Even though we are in the summer season, snow is on the way to parts of Western Canada for July 1
Western Canada has found itself awash in unusually cold temperatures, due to an upper-level low, which is a large dip in the jetstream. That's so far had some effects for the B.C. Interior, which has carried some storm risk due to unstable atmospheric conditions this week.
What it means for people living in the higher terrain of the B.C and Alberta Rockies looks to be a very different story.
As we climb in altitude, our temperatures decrease, so if temperatures are below normal at lower elevations imagine how cold it is about three kilometres up!
At about 3000 metres, there will be snowfall on Wednesday evening and into Thursday morning, which will certainly make for some good Canada Day conversation.
The snow could add up to a few centimetres or so in the peaks of the Rockies. How normal is this? While it might seem peculiar, particularly for most of Canada where temperatures are well into the 20s and even 30s for some, July snow is not unheard of in Western Canada.
Banff for example has seen as much at 7.6 cm of snow in July, when a considerable snowfall happened on July 23, 1918.
The trough in the west and the ridge in the east has been our dominant pattern through the spring and early part of summer. There is no sign of this changing anytime soon, so more high elevation snowfall is indeed a possibility in the near future.