Ag Weather Forum

Canadian Harvest Races Ahead

Doug Webster
By  Doug Webster , DTN Senior Ag Meteorologist

Western Canada's crop regions certainly experienced some major bumps in the road back in September when snow and cold brought some crop damage and quality concerns as well as a stoppage in the developing harvest. That all seems to be ancient history now with an excellent weather pattern in place for the rapidly advancing harvest. Only Manitoba has seen weather conditions not as agreeable for harvest.

During the past several weeks we have seen the weather regime across North America do a couple switches from the all too familiar blocking patterns to periods when an El Nino looking pattern seems to be in place. During the blocking episodes the colder, wetter weather has taken hold such as earlier in September and for a brief period to start October.

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At other times when the blocking disappears it seems that signs of an El Nino like weather pattern take hold. This was the case later in September and again during the past week or so. The El Nino look to our weather is highly favorable for harvest with the main jet stream flow moving west to east allowing Pacific air to flood southern and western Canada and keeping rainfall at a minimum and temperatures mild.

Current model projections keep this El Nino look to our weather in place for the next 10 days and maybe even longer. Conditions through the tropical Pacific remain in a mode that favors a developing weak to moderate El Nino and we have already seen signs that El Nino could already be in place.

Lack of tropical activity through the tropical Atlantic and the above average eastern Pacific tropical activity are indicators of an El Nino. There have been 3 pushes of tropical moisture out of the eastern Pacific into the U.S. Southwest so far this season implying El Nino and some of the warm, dry weather western Canada has experienced early this fall are El Nino-like.

It seems that when blocking goes away across North America that El Nino conditions take hold and this is what we may see during the remainder of the fall. As long as high latitude blocking remains at bay then mild, mostly dry El Nino conditions may be the best forecast for western Canada. We can't rule out that some blocking may come along from time to time to disrupt the El Nino pattern and bring a couple of periods when temperatures take a nose dive and a quick deposit of snow occurs.

For the next week or two it appears that little or no blocking will occur and this should allow farmers to race ahead with harvest and hopefully finish up before winter sets in. As of the start of October both Alberta and Saskatchewan were close to being on pace with normal harvest progress and with the good weather since one would assume excellent progress has been made during the first week of October. Manitoba as seen some colder, wetter conditions during the recent week and harvest progress has been a little slower there but much improved weather prospects are seen during the next week bringing help for farmers.

Doug Webster can be reached at doug.webster@dtn.com

(CZ)

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