Southern Ontario: Snowfall Outlook for Friday, February 25, 2022

Forecast Discussion

A system is expected to bring widespread accumulating snow throughout Southern Ontario beginning early Friday morning. The first bands of precipitation will reach regions around Lake Erie sometime around the midnight hour. Light to moderate snow will continue to spread to the northeast throughout the predawn hours on Friday reaching the GTA by 2-4 am and Central/Eastern Ontario by the late morning.

The timing of this event couldn’t be any worse for those commuting on Friday morning with the heaviest snow occurring around sunrise. This event will be more of a persistent moderate snowfall with hourly accumulation ranging from 1-3cm. As a result, travel will still be heavily impacted, but road crews should be able to keep up for the most part and shouldn’t be overwhelming.

Blowing snow could be an issue as 40-60km/h wind gusts combined with this light powdery snow are a recipe for reduced visibility. Based on the timing, school bus cancellations can’t be ruled out mainly in the more rural school boards as they tend to be more sensitive to weather conditions. Travel according to the conditions and if possible, delay any travel until later in the day. This will be a fairly fast-moving snowfall event as we expect it will taper off by the late morning for Southwestern Ontario and mid-afternoon in Eastern Ontario.

We are looking at the highest snowfall totals from this event through Eastern Ontario along with the Niagara/Hamilton region due to lake enhancement off Lake Ontario. General accumulation here will range from 12-20cm with locally up to 25cm possible. For the rest of the Golden Horseshoe and into parts of Central Ontario, we can expect totals of between 8 and 14cm although a few locations particularly through the GTA could exceed the 15cm mark. Lower amounts are expected for Southwestern Ontario which should top out at somewhere around 6-12cm. Totals will decrease even further to the northwest including Parry Sound and Algonquin Park only expected to pick up a few centimetres of fresh snow if anything at all.

It should be mentioned that this event does appear to have a significant lake enhancement element associated with it. What does this mean? Well, snowfall accumulation with these events tends to have quite an uneven distribution. For example, one location could see 20+cm of snow while just down the road there is less than half of that. Don’t be surprised to see some locations overachieve the forecast, but we believe it’s more realistic to focus on the overall general totals.

While there is a fair amount of confidence in the models with this forecast, we may have to make adjustments on Thursday. If the track shifts either to the north or south we would have to also shift our forecast based on that change. However, we shouldn’t see any major changes to the forecast.