After a very mild winter with daytime temperatures into the 40's(F) and occasionally even 50's(F), around midnight on Saturday the temperature plunged. Sunday was very cold with much wind and blowing snow. You can see on the balcony that there wasn't that much snow that settled--it just looks like a lot when the wind is howling. We stayed inside all day Sunday. Even Dickens, after poking his nose outdoors, decided to spend the day inside where it's warm.
Monday and Tuesday were also very, very cold, but without the snowfall. And now this morningwe've reached the nadir: it simply cannot dip much lower than this.
According to the government weather site for our town, the ambient temperature is -33ºC, but with the wind chill it feels like -45ºC. Our thermometer shows -39ºC. We are almost always lower than the official temperature for our area because our property is located at the lowest point on our road and cold air settles in to the lowest points. Just to compare that with F., the two scales come together at -40º, and 5ºC equals 9ºF, so that puts what you'd feel if you stepped out our back door down to a frightful -49ºF.
Jim just stepped out the back door, heading for our "cold storage" building--to turn the heat on in there! Otherwise our stored plants would freeze.
Normal highs and lows for this time of year in our area are -3ºC and -15ºC. Somehow I think that we have to go through some of this extreme cold to keep that balance since we've had many mornings this winter on which the temperature hovered just above or just below freezing.
The good news is that the forecast for this weekend calls for Sunday's high to be +2ºC and the low to be -9ºC. It's not that we're in favor of global warming, but a little warming for Alberta might not be a bad thing!
Just for contrast here's a photo of the thermometer taken September 2010:
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