Saw this in my RSS reader this morning and it made me smile…

I looked out the window at work a few minutes ago and saw the leading edge of a wall of snow moving in:

About 30 seconds later the view was this:

And about 20 minutes later it’s back to normal:

Between the time of the first and last photos, the RCMP closed Sir John A. MacDonald Parkway along the shore of the Ottawa River because of the lack of visibility.

https://twitter.com/StuMillsCBC/status/427840858755313664

On the Franktown radar, it looked like this:

Just before noon today I noticed that the sky to the north of the Ottawa River was nice and clear, while the sky to the south was overcast. Well, that’s because the boundary between the high pressure to the north and the low pressure to the south was more or less right there.

The temperature at Ottawa Airport a few minutes later (i.e. noon) was -5C, while in Pembroke about 2 hours to the northwest it was -12C and -16C in North Bay, which is a couple of hours past Pembroke.

If you check out the following two graphs, you can see the incoming cold air coming in from the northwest:

So, 2014 is off to a bit of an extreme start weather-wise. We saw -27C weather that felt like -40 thanks to the wind last Thursday, and Winnipeg was colder than Mars.

This evening, it’s about -5C and forecast to go above 0C tomorrow. The incoming warm front has been causing the air pressure to plummet the last few hours (the blue line in the graph below) and we can expect to see freezing rain and probably rain overnight and in the morning. A few hours after that, we can expect to see the cold air return with over the course of a few hours, which should make the evening commute rather messy, with the evening forecast to be -24C and a windchill of -33.

If you look at the aviation forecast, you can see the wind change direction from being out of the northeast (050) at midnight local time (0500Z) to coming from the southwest (230) by 8 am (1300Z):

TAF CYOW 060242Z 0603/0624 07015G25KT 6SM -FZRA -SN FEW006 OVC025
TEMPO 0603/0605 2SM FZRA -PL BR BKN006 OVC030
FM060500 08015G25KT 2SM -FZRA BR OVC005 TEMPO 0605/0611 6SM -FZRA BR OVC010
FM061100 10008KT WS010/17032KT 1SM -RA BR OVC003 PROB40 0611/0612 1SM -FZRA BR
FM061300 23020G35KT 2SM -RA BR OVC008
FM061600 25020G35KT P6SM BKN025
RMK NXT FCST BY 060600Z=

And you can see that the wind from 1300Z on is going to be 20 knots gusting to 35 knots (37 km/h gusting to 65 km/h). Ick.

Dress warmly because weather like that can cause frostbite before you realize it.