Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Rocky Mountain July SNOW

Photo from Kent Kasey of The Birmingham News, Alabama (ai.com). Apparently his golf game was interrupted. You have to love Alberta weather!

While we have been sweltering in high heat and humidity a snowstorm affected portions of the highest elevations of the Rockies from Alberta into northwestern Montana earlier this week. I was looking at the numbers for Jasper, Alberta and they are very impressive. A slow moving unseasonably strong storm moved across the Prairies with heavy rain in Alberta and thunderstorms in Saskatchewan. This is all part of what has been a very stormy year in western Canada. Jasper was 32C (90F) on Friday, July 9th. Just 2 days later, as the rain moved in along a cold front, the temperature had plummeted to 1.6C (34F) and the heavy rain changed to heavy wet snow. Jasper recorded about 57mm of precipitation with at least half of that falling as snow (by some accounts as much as 20cm). The same storm brought heavy rain to the other parts of Alberta with 100mm at Red Deer and 67.6mm at Edmonton.

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