Mother Nature provided another soft blanket of snow for Northern BC residents on Thursday.
“It was quite light as some areas reported around six to seven centimetres, it was quite variable across the region and is moving on out within the next hour or so,” says Greg Pearce, Environment Canada Meteorologist.
However, a windy and chilly weekend is expected for the north with the region expecting a bit of a weather shift by Saturday.
“We have an Arctic front right now that is up over the north part of the province and that’s going to be moving southward as we move into the day tomorrow. We’ll see a low tonight down to minus eleven and then tomorrow the winds will increase from the north and we’re expecting them to be anywhere from forty to sixty kilometres per hour.”
“We get into a deep dome of cold, arctic air for the rest of the weekend and Saturday night we’re looking at overnight lows of minus seventeen, minus eighteen and there will be some wind with that as wind chills will be in the minus twenties and then on Sunday we’ll have sunny skies but only a high of minus nine.”
Pearce says this is all part of the La Nina pattern they predicted earlier on in the season.
“We had talked about that earlier and sometimes it doesn’t show up until later in the winter and that seems to be the case as we have a ridge of high pressure out over the eastern Pacific and that means over BC we have a northerly flow that is coming right from the Arctic. If that ridge was coming over top of us we would have lots of sunshine and mild temperatures.”
“If you’re headed south from Prince George down into the southern interior we do have special weather statements out and there is going to be a low-pressure system arriving at the coast during the same time as the Arctic front pushes down south Saturday night into Sunday morning, so there will be quite a bit of snow with 10 to 20 centimetres expected,” added Pearce.
The conditions aren’t expected to warm up until Wednesday.