A Rainy Day

In Ottawa, it doesn’t rain, it pours. You barely get any warn­ing at all: one minute, the sky is grey and you feel a drop of water, the next one you are as soaked as if you had taken a shower. Sim­i­larly, thun­der­storms can be quite impres­sive in the area: flash floods and power out­ages are not that rare. It’s part of our severe weather-prone coun­try, I guess.

Warm Weather Makes Headlines

Just a few weeks ago, it was all ice and snow in Canada’s national cap­i­tal. The weather had been mild by Cana­dian stan­dards but we were still shov­el­ing snow and wear­ing win­ter boots. We attended the Win­ter­lude fes­ti­val and we were skat­ing (or eat­ing beaver tails…) on the Rideau Canal.
And sud­denly, it got warm. It sur­prised us all.

The Great Melt

After the great freeze, we woke up to the great melt. The weather was a bit warmer and all the ice accu­mu­lated had started to melt.

Trees were lit­er­ally shed­ding ice. Every blast of wind shook the tree limbs, coated in ice — it sounded like a wind chime. We were lucky: no power line snapped in our neighborhood.

Freezing Rain

We got a bad win­ter sur­prise today when we woke up to heavy freez­ing rain this morn­ing. Yuck.

Freez­ing rain is pretty unique to very cold coun­tries. When sur­face tem­per­a­tures are below freez­ing, rain­drops freeze upon impact with any object they encounter. The result­ing ice accu­mu­lates to a thick­ness of sev­eral cen­time­ters and it coats just about anything.

And... Winter Is Here

It was cold but nice yes­ter­day night and for a sec­ond, I humored myself with the thought that Weather Canada could be wrong. Of course, it wasn’t. It never is. Weather is what Cana­di­ans pre­dict best.

The wind was extremely strong this morn­ing and I could barely keep my head up while wait­ing for the bus. Mind you, I had time to prac­tice — it was 30 min­utes late.

Not Winter Already...

It’s only Octo­ber and it looks like the “Cana­di­ans take their kids trick-or-treating in a bliz­zard” joke wasn’t really a joke after all. We have just had our first win­ter storm and it is very cold right now.

Winter In Canada

Win­ter has set­tled in the cap­i­tal, and lately, we have been able to enjoy Canada’s trade­mark weather: pure blue sky with a high of –20C. But don’t think the weather is stop­ping us from going out.

Blizzard? Checked!

The weather chan­nel didn’t lie, indeed. The fore­cast I posted in Seven Cana­dian Win­ter Facts was right on. This is what my Sun­day looked like…