See ya later winter!
Was it really that bad?
We send winter packing at 5:58 this afternoon.
Not a minute too soon for some but looking back, Environment Canada’s David Phillips says it was pretty close to being a normal winter. The average temperature was just half a degree colder than normal and there was just five percent more snow than usual. The coldest it got was -26 on January 21 and there were just seven days where the temperature dipped below minus 20 (there were 13 such days last winter).
Phillips admits it did seem like a long winter. With cooler temperatures in October and November, he says we never really had a Fall season.
We might actually get a spring this year
As for spring, Phillips says what we’ve seen in the last few days is likely to continue: temperatures as high as 10 and as low as -10, some rain, some snow. A normal spring, he says, unlike last year when April brought us four times more snow than usual.
That said, Phillips reminds us that 25 centimetres of snow in the Barrie-area after the first day of spring is not out of the ordinary.
