Be patient, Manitoba: 'Seasonable' March ahead, says Environment Canada meteorologist

After a slightly colder-than-normal February, Manitobans are in store for a seasonable March, says a senior climatologist with Environment Canada.

We'll have to be patient for spring, but it will come — eventually, says David Phillips.

"Temperature-wise, we think it will be a little bit of back and forth and up and down" this March, Phillips told Marcy Markusa in a Wednesday interview with CBC's Information Radio.

"Just not a rush to spring…. A little patience is the operative word here. It's not going to be all of a sudden the spring will have sprung."

The past winter "has been softer and gentler than last winter," when multiple Colorado lows brought huge dumps of snow to the province.

But "in the next month we can expect to see winter not leaving quietly," said Phillips, pointing out that about 30 per cent of annual snowfall usually occurs after the first of March.

"We can expect to see it fading, but it's going to be sluggish. What we [will] see in spring is very typical. You'll see winter wanting to hang on and spring wanting to get a foothold.''

On the plus side, the most intensely cold months are behind us, and coming cold stretches are unlikely to last as long.

"You typically have maybe three days of it at most [in March and early April], rather than three weeks of it," Phillips said.

One thing Manitobans won't likely have to worry about this year is the amount of precipitation we had last year, he said. 

"One thing I don't think we'll see are those Colorado lows, that painfully just caused you to have a spring last year that had three and a half times the [normal] amount of precipitation," he said.

"So my sense is that there won't be the worries of the flooding that there was last year, and farmers will be able to get onto their fields a little early, and the soil moisture is there.

"So I think things are looking up."