ONTARIO — All-time January daily records are in jeopardy for parts of Ontario this weekend as a mess of a storm threatens significant rain, ice and snow.
Though Thursday will start off colder than it’s been in weeks, temperatures soon rise comfortably above zero into the weekend, but the warmup will be accompanied by a messy weekend system that will start off with record-breaking rain, then a few hours of freezing rain as the cold returns.
Wednesday’s snow squalls left many Ontarians shovelling in the traditional snowbelt regions, but it doesn’t seem like a repeat performance is in the cards for Thursday. Far to the north, an unrelated system will make for some not-out-of-the-ordinary but still significant amounts, through Thursday.
Though a calmer day in the south, it’ll start off quite chilly, with morning lows the coldest the province has seen in weeks. However, it won’t stay that cold for long. Temperatures will recover to near-freezing across much of the south through the day Thursday, and Friday is looking even rosier, with a surge of warm air taking daytime highs into the high single digits — possibly even breaking the 10ºC mark for the extreme southwest.
Before the mild air moves in, however, the leading edge of the system will encounter the lingering cold. That spells the potential for a mix of rain and snow moving northeastward through southern Ontario overnight Thursday into Friday. By the time the morning alarm goes off, however, we should be looking at rain across the board, ahead of some very significant impacts for the weekend.
Behind that early spring-like front, a much more wintry blast is possible as a strong cold front crosses the region Saturday. Environment Canada has already issued a special weather statement for much of southern Ontario ahead of this system, anticipating widespread rain, freezing rain, and snow. Abundant moisture from the Gulf of Mexico will fuel the weekend weather. In fact, many spots in southern Ontario could be looking at getting their entire January average rainfall in just 12 hours through early Saturday.
“All-time January daily precipitation records are in jeopardy with this storm, depending on the timing of the rainfall as it spills into two days,” says meteorologist Tyler Hamilton. “But some stations could hit their monthly precipitation average with the single storm this weekend.”
The rain will be in full swing by Saturday morning, and temperatures will peak a little warmer even than Friday, likely cracking the double-digit mark for some communities. But, downpours or no, it IS January, which means proper winter cold is never too far off. And, in the case of this weekend’s system, the return of cold temperatures will arrive beginning late Saturday morning, cutting southward across the province as the afternoon progresses. That will mean some of that prodigious precipitation will begin falling as freezing rain, and most places will be likely to see a few hours of it, including the GTA, though parts of the southwest will likely escape.
Even once the rain tapers off, temperatures will have fallen low enough by Sunday that much of what fell will have frozen, so people in the region should be prepared to salt their sidewalks and driveways when they have the chance.
For areas further north, like the Bruce Peninsula, cottage country and the Ottawa Valley, it’ll be cold enough for some of the precipitation to switchover from rain to snow, at times significant.
An abundance of cold air from the Arctic is set to spill across western and central Canada next week. However, a very mild pattern will continue over the eastern U.S. That warmer weather will attempt to surge back into southern Ontario at times, limiting a lack of any consistent cold weather into the mid-January mark, with the frigid conditions remaining well to the west. This type of set-up will create an active pattern, with the potential for the storm track to be far enough south to give blasts of more wintry weather in the weeks ahead. “We are closely watching some conflicting signals for where the pattern will head during the final 10 days of January, but at this point it looks like the arctic air will have more of an influence on our region,” says Gillham.
