The forecast was right — south-central and southeastern Manitoba is waking up to a fresh coat of snow.
The first few hours of a springtime Colorado low has resulted in around six centimetres of snow measured at Winnipeg’s airport, while preliminary numbers from Environment Canada say areas to the east, like Steinbach, are dealing with around 15 cm.
Snow is expected to continue falling throughout the day, accompanied by winds gusting up to 60 km/h.
Environment Canada meteorologist Rose Carlsen told 680 CJOB’s The Start that there’s a plus side to the significant winds — they’ll help push the storm along.
“It’s going to be pretty steady — it’s not going to be a hard jump up. It’s going to be a pretty even increase of the winds,” she said.
“We do have a system of high pressure building in through tomorrow. As the system pulls out, it should be clearing up fairly quickly throughout tomorrow.”
Carlsen said there’s a significant pattern change ahead, although it’s too early to say definitively whether the post-storm temperatures will be as warm — in the mid-teens — as initially predicted.
“Sometimes when you get far into the long range you have a significant event like this that’s maybe a little bit more outside the normal realm of possibility, you can get some numbers in the long range that are not maybe representative of what’s actually going to happen,” she said.
“We are expecting a warm-up, but it might not be quite up to the 14-15 (degrees) that’s in the forecast”
Winnipeg is expected to see a high of -5 C Wednesday while the city — and most of southern Manitoba in the eastern half of the province — remains under a winter storm warning.
The City of Winnipeg says it has snow clearing operations underway. As of 7 a.m. Wednesday, a major truck plowing operation began on priority one and priority two streets.
The city’s Ken Allen told Global Winnipeg that salting and sanding work has been ongoing since Tuesday night, and will continue throughout the day.
“It’s a team effort and we’re going to get this city cleaned up as quickly as we can,” Allen said.
“They’re going to be out there all day today — they’re going to be truck plowing the main routes, bus routes and collector streets.
“There’s going to be a lot of front-end loaders out there clearing approaches and making sure the piles are moved away from the corners. It’s going to be busy, so we want to remind motorists to drive to winter conditions, but to keep an eye out for the trucks and heavy equipment that are going to be out there.”