Return to Winter for Central and Eastern Ontario With Up to 20cm of Snow Possible Throughout the Weekend

The story this winter has been how uneventful it has been for most of Southern Ontario. Aside from a few storms here and there, we haven’t really seen a significant winter storm or widespread lake effect snow events. That’s especially true for Eastern Ontario which has often landed on the warm side of the few systems we saw in December with little snowfall accumulation. But as we head into the end of January and the start of February, there is a pattern shift in the works and we’ll start to see the first changes this weekend with a system set to bring accumulating snowfall to Central and Eastern Ontario. For the snow lovers out there, you will be happy to hear that Eastern Ontario is in the bullseye for between 15-25cm throughout the Ottawa, Brockville, and Cornwall area by the end of the weekend.

We’re already seeing the first precipitation bands associated with this system moving into Southern Ontario. Currently, we’re seeing mostly rain through Southwestern Ontario and into the GTA around Lake Ontario. Later in the evening, this will transition over to some light to moderate wet snow away from the lakeshore with rainfall continuing near Lake Ontario. More intense precipitation bands will start to affect Eastern Ontario early Saturday morning bringing short bursts of very heavy snowfall rates of near 5cm per hour through the Ottawa area just before sunrise. Expect very bad road conditions during the morning hours of Saturday.

Persistent snowfall will continue from Georgian Bay and eastward into Eastern Ontario throughout the day on Saturday and even into Sunday. Although it will slowly taper off late Sunday morning. We could see some minor lake effect snow off Lake Huron and Georgian Bay early Sunday as well providing a few centimeters of additional accumulation.

As we mentioned, the heaviest accumulation will be found in Eastern Ontario where we expect between 12-20cm by the end of the weekend and perhaps as much as 25cm in localized areas. For the rest of Central and Eastern Ontario, we’re looking at between 6-12cm of snowfall accumulation between the two days. The accumulation will drop for Southwestern Ontario and the GTA with between 2-6cm possible around Lake Huron and Georgian Bay where lake effect activity on Sunday could add a few extra centimeters on top of the. system snow. Other areas can expect trace amounts including the GTA/Niagara region and into Southwestern Ontario.

For the rest of the week, we’re looking at very cold air flood into the province pushing temperatures to near or below -20°C for overnight lows several days this week. The cold temperatures appear to linger around for the rest of the month with the potential to cause some snow squall outbreaks off Georgian Bay and Lake Huron with them being wide open. More details on that soon!.