(file photo/paNOW Staff)

By Rob Mahon

Warm Weather Remains

Second summer to stick around in Saskatchewan

Sep 28, 2021 | 10:54 AM

Officially, summer is over in Saskatchewan and has been for just under a week. Unofficially, however, most Saskatchewan residents know better than to attach the beginning and end of summer to a date on the calendar in a province with such unpredictable weather.

The past several days, the entire province, including the northern portion, has had temperatures well above average. The run of warm, sunny weather should continue through the end of this week into next and possibly even beyond that.

“A big ridge of high pressure over much of Western Canada,” said Environment Canada regional meteorologist Terri Lang. “There’s a trough of low pressure digging off the cost of British Columbia, and what that does is it really pumps up that jet stream over top of Saskatchewan and really brings in those warm temperatures.”

Lang said the forecast becomes harder to predict once they reach ten days out, but within those ten days there’s very little sign of the warm weather going away. The only blip on the radar is a sudden burst of low pressure expected to come through in the Prince Albert area tomorrow which will likely bring rain with it.

“Not widespread and not a lot of accumulation,” Lang said. “We’re going to get into a little bit of a cooler flow on Wednesday, so northwesterly winds, gusty, certainly some cooler temperatures with that.”

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From there, however, it’s right back to warmer, sunnier weather, with average temperatures for this time of year in the Prince Albert area being about 13 or 14 Celsius and the expected highs all being above 20. The high-pressure ridge coming in will actually produce a similar effect to a chinook.

“Most often, we talk about chinooks in the winter but they also occur in the summer when the air comes down off the mountains,” Lang said. “When it comes down off the mountains, it actually warms the air even more, so we’re really benefiting from that type of pattern.”

While it doesn’t look as though we’ll break any temperature records (the highest temperature ever recorded in Prince Albert on October 3, for example was 30.6), Lang expects us to stay above average for at least the rest of this seven-day forecast.

“Patterns like that, when they get established, tend to stay for a few days,” she said. “Certainly it looks like into even mid-next week, that warm and dry trend continues.”

Lang added September and October tend to be among the driest months of the year.

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rob.mahon@pattisonmedia.com

On Twitter: @RobMahonPxP