Prairies may be in for extreme winter after an already wicked summer

REGINA – Fall can mean a lot of things like colorful leaves and pumpkins, but it’s also an indication that winter is just around the corner.

Amy Montheuy brought her kids to the Pumpkin Hollow Corn Maze in Lumsden to officially kick off the season.

“The smell is fresh, and the leaves. I don’t know, everything is about the leaves!” she explained, as to why she loves autumn.

Perhaps the colorful season will be more kind then this summer’s wicked weather.

In June Saskatchewan saw record rainfall and devastating floods, followed by a wind storm that uprooted trees and tore homes to pieces in August.

Regina was also hit with a heat wave with temperatures soaring past 40 degrees with the humidity, followed by more rain in September.

Brian Proctor is a meteorologist with Environment Canada and explained that Saskatchewan saw significantly more rain during the summer than average.

“Our precipitation in some of those communities exceeded 500 mm which is 200 per cent more then we’d see in a typical season,” he added.

After a wet summer, we’re heading into fall above seasonal for this time of year, but winter is a different story.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac is calling for a year of extremes including “teeth chattering cold” and above normal snowfall.

Environment Canada, however, has a less dramatic outlook.

“Our seasonal forecast models at this point and time, aren’t indicating anything much more than normal conditions through the winter,” explained Proctor. “There’s no clear signal in the atmosphere as to a colder than normal, warmer than normal, dryer or wetter than normal sort of patterns.”