Alberta Foothills Weather

Nothing too far from normal for this time of the year since the last post. Every morning we have had a skiff of snow that melted quickly and turned into puffy towers for the afternoons. A few shots of thundersnow reported in Airdrie and Drayton Valley but nothing here.
Yesterday the north wind arrived as expected [...]

The northern lights were out again last night, we have been in a moderate geomagnetic storm since the arrival of a coronal hole wind stream early yesterday. We missed the best part during the daylight hours and by the time it got dark the storm had calmed a bit, producing only a green glow the [...]

Space weather was going to be my focus in this post, and I was just gathering up some images when a M-class flare erupted from our ever so sleepy sun at 18:36z, hitting M1.7 at 18:56 (12:56pmMST). I was about to scratch out something about the first two spots that appeared yesterday, 987 and 988, [...]

Spring arrived in style today with a nice little convective explosion east of Red Deer this afternoon. Conditions came together suddenly at 1pm, with a few nice aggressive towering cumulus going up just east of Red Deer, then slowly moving east over the next few hours. By 3pm a line of 3 cells had begun [...]

No precipitation yesterday, not a drop or a flake. A few nice cumulus right around home and some pretty virga, but nothing very exciting. Tower goes up, tower collapses on itself, repeat. Still a nice treat for the last few hours of winter. Today looks similar, with slack flow and unstable air. I can [...]

WOCN16 CWWG 181638
Updated special weather statement issued for regions of northern
Alberta by Environment Canada at 10:38 AM MDT Tuesday 18 March 2008.
Special weather statement issued for..
Drayton Valley - Devon - Rimbey - Pigeon Lake
Leduc - Camrose - Wetaskiwin - Tofield.
Along with robins, longer days and mud puddles, spring also
Brings unstable airmasses. We will see an [...]

Snow, I shall miss thee.
The last bits of winter rolled thru early this morning, covering everything with a nice coat of sticky snow. We got ~5cm here and it looked like they got more to the southwest. Again.
After picking up a cm or two of flakes friday night, we headed out towards the James river [...]

More warm since last post, well above normals of +2/-9. The only snow left anywhere around here is in the shade. Everything has pretty much dried out, gravel roads are dusty and the fields are mostly dry already. The Red Deer river is wide open. That sure wasn’t much of a winter!
The last kick at [...]

Darling buds of March?
The trees seem to think spring has arrived and most of them have started budding out over the past week, the pussywillows have been out for at least a week. Road bans were applied in Red Deer county this morning, just in time for the hottest day of the year so far, [...]

Update March 9 - Click here to watch a 3.5mb time-lapse movie of the auroras over Alberta last night. It covers 1.5 hours from 8:30-10pm local time (3:30z-5z) and is composed of 316 shots of 15 sec. each, 3 per minute.
A coronal hole solar wind stream packing an abnormally large batch of magnetic goodies arrived [...]