Ag Weather Forum

Hit-and-Miss Showers for Western Canada

Doug Webster
By  Doug Webster , DTN Senior Ag Meteorologist
(Map courtesy Ag Canada)

A weather pattern with many similarities to last winter covers North America at this time. A western North America ridge is bringing hot weather to the western U.S. and southwest Canada while cooler-than-normal readings cover central and eastern Canada into the Midwest.

Like last winter precipitation is having a tough time covering the majority of the western Prairies while Manitoba is doing better. This upper air pattern may be being fueled by a large area of above normal sea surface temperatures across the Gulf of Alaska which has been in this location since late last summer.

P[L1] D[0x0] M[300x250] OOP[F] ADUNIT[] T[]

The bad news is that for those suffering from severe dryness there does not appear to be any major shift in the overall weather pattern coming anytime soon. Hit-and-miss showers have dotted the landscape during the recent weeks, giving a small percentage of Alberta and Saskatchewan some beneficial rains, but for most dryness continues to build, delaying crop progress.

During the past month most of the region has seen much less rainfall than needed for crop development, but far southern Manitoba as well as a couple of small pockets of central Saskatchewan and western Alberta have seen excess rains. The spotty nature of the rains is generally what we see during the summer season as showers develop in a local nature. The large-scale precipitation patterns of winter are typically associated with low pressure areas and overrunning precipitation. At this time of year these systems are crossing northern Canada most of the time.

The latest soil moisture reports from Alberta are showing 71% of the province is now seeing surface soil moisture levels in the fair to poor category and only 27% good. Dry weather across Saskatchewan during the growing season is delaying an increasing amount of crops. Across Manitoba conditions are better, with dry conditions covering central and south-central areas while it is actually too wet across far southern areas where recent storms have done some spotty damage.

The upcoming weather pattern will continue to feature mostly isolated to scattered showers across the region every several days as fronts cross the region but without the needed widespread rains. This appears to be what we should expect for much of July.

Temperatures will undergo a cool down this weekend into early next week which may help a little but most indicators point toward a revival of the western North America ridge later next week and into mid-July which may cause hot weather to return to western areas of the Prairies.

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

P[] D[728x170] M[320x75] OOP[F] ADUNIT[] T[]
P[L2] D[728x90] M[320x50] OOP[F] ADUNIT[] T[]

Comments

To comment, please Log In or Join our Community .