Daniel Bezte

Reading Time: 3 minutes Thanks to continued budget cuts by our government, reliable weather data is getting harder and harder to get. At the beginning of each month I like to look back and see what the weather has been like across our part of the world, but to do this reliably I need to look at weather records […] Read more

Reading Time: 3 minutes After a fairly cool spring with few if any thunderstorms, summer has started to make headway into the Prairies over the last few weeks. In some years summers come and go with only the odd thundershower and maybe one big thunderstorm, but in other years every storm that comes along seems to bring severe weather. […] Read more

The never-ending winter was caused by stubborn ridges 
of high pressure over the West Coast and Greenland


Reading Time: 3 minutes Like most of central North America, Alberta was not able to dodge the cold weather that just didn’t seem to want to go away this spring. Central North America felt the effects of what is known as a blocking pattern. This is when the jet stream gets stuck (for the most part) in the same […] Read more

Reading Time: 3 minutes I recently came across a weather article that was a purely academic discussion about radiational cooling. It was one of those articles that at first glance seemed to be purely a discussion for true weather geeks, meteorologists and university professors, with very little if anything to do with an everyday understanding of the weather, at […] Read more

Reading Time: 3 minutes Every once in a while the atmosphere behaves in what I call a textbook example. The atmosphere is a fairly chaotic system, that’s why it is so difficult to forecast the weather. If you take the time to read and try to understand how the experts think it all works, you end up learning the […] Read more

Reading Time: 3 minutes As summer works its way back into our region it’s time to pick up where we left off in our discussion of severe summer weather. In this article we’ll look at how we can predict which direction a thunderstorm might be moving. Trying to figure out just how intense and which direction a thunderstorm is […] Read more

Take your pick  Break out the darts and blindfold; for a long-range 
forecast, the odds are in your favour


Reading Time: 3 minutes So far this spring winter has been able to keep a fairly good grip on most of the three Prairie provinces. While there has been the odd day here and there with above-freezing temperatures, we haven’t seen any significant melting yet. On the other side of the coin, with the exception of a few cold […] Read more

Confirmation Satellite technology has supported the old ice volume 
modelling system’s estimates

Reading Time: 3 minutes Arctic sea ice made the headlines again last week, as a new study has confirmed what some climate models have been predicting. When you hear discussions about summer melt season ice loss in the Arctic, they are talking about ice extent — that is, how much the surface area of ice has either melted or […] Read more

Analysis Our weather columnist crunches 60 years of data 
to see if the old-timers are right

Reading Time: 3 minutes I have received a fair number of emails over the last while asking if we are seeing more melting than we used to during the winter. These types of questions interest me as they will often have two possible answers. The first answer could be that yes, we are seeing more melting, but more often […] Read more

Reading Time: 3 minutes In our last article I finished our global look back at 2012 weather worldwide by discussing the record-low Arctic sea ice extent last September. Moving on to October, far and away the biggest weather story of that month was Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy, which ended up causing billions of dollars’ worth of damage along the eastern seaboard […] Read more