The bad news is the frigid temperatures are not going away anytime soon.
On Monday morning winter settled in with temperatures dipping to -20 degrees Celsius. The cold is expected to stay for a couple of weeks. Temperatures went as low as -30 C on Friday. But wind chills made the cold feel more like -35.
Today temperatures will reach a high of -24 and a low of -28. On Sunday temperatures will reach high of -21 and a low of -23. However, winds gusting up to 20 km/h are expecting to make those temperatures feel much colder.
Tuesday is expected to be the warmest day of the week with a high of -16 C, but the pesky wind will make it feel as much as 10 degrees colder.
“These cold snaps, when they do move in in December, they tend to be seven to 10 days, sometimes two weeks, and this looks like this will be one of the longer ones,” Dan Kulak, meteorologist for Environment and Climate Change Canada said.
This time of year typically sees a daytime average high of -6 C and a daytime average low of -16 C. Right now temperatures are roughly 15 degrees below normal for the daytime high and 10 degrees below normal for the daily low.
For the next week temperatures will continue to sit well below average until the week before Christmas, when temperatures will rise closer to the seasonal averages.
The reason for this cold snap is cold air from Alaska and Russia migrating down to Alberta.
As cold as it may feel, this weather is not record-setting. On Dec. 7, 2016 the temperature was -22 C but the record low temperature for Dec. 7 was -38 C in 1927.
“We don’t get those records anymore,” Kulak said. “Just too much urban growth and then other things that people would attribute the warming to. The fact that cities have grown quite a bit typically means that we don’t get into the really cold weather that we used to get into.”
Kulak says another reason it may feel colder than usual is the unusually warm winter we had last year due to El Nińo. We may not be used to the frosty winter weather.
Although the weather is cold, we won’t see much precipitation during the frigid snap.
“We don’t have a lot [of snow] with the arctic air that’s entrenched itself upon us,” Kulak said. “Snow is going to be somewhat minimal. The snow that we do get tends to be lighter and fluffier with these types of temperatures. You don’t get that really wet snow at -20 and you don’t get a lot of moisture at -20.”
The cold contributed to the death of one Alberta woman in a rural area near Didsbury. The woman, in her 80s, tripped while getting out of her vehicle and was unable to get up. At least an hour later family members found her suffering from injuries from her fall and from exposure to the cold. She was transported to a Calgary hospital where she later died.
