Accessibility and Access Keys [0]
Feeling a bit cool about spring’s slow arrival? Climatologist David Phillips tells Bruce Ward it’s nature’s way of easing a tough winter out.
In Ottawa, there’s always a gap between the first day of spring and the first spring day.
This year the gap has felt more like an abyss. Spring arrived on March 20, but since then the temperature has barely climbed above freezing on most days. The first spring day? The weekend is looking good, with forecast highs of 10C for Saturday and Sunday. But there’s still all that snow around.
“When you have snow, you can’t get spring. Prairie people know this,” said David Phillips, Environment Canada’s senior climatologist. “Snow on the ground chills the air and the first dibs on warm air is to melt the snow.”
And Ottawa still has about 25 centimetres of snow depth.
“Typically, you don’t see any snow on the ground in the first week of April. The snow cover has disappeared. But there’s a long way to go until the warm air warms us instead of melting the snow.”
You remember what a spring day feels like, right? It’s a day when the sun warms your shoulders, and there’s no snow on the ground. The birds are tootling in the trees and little kids in rain boots are on tricycles, clattering down the sidewalk.
Mr. Phillips insists that our overdue spring is good news.
“The weather you’re cursing is the weather you should be blessing. It’s nature’s way of making up for a tough winter by easing it out, and not going from slush to sweat. I’d rather stand in a foot of snow than a foot of water.”
If spring seems way overdue, it’s partly because the average temperature in March was almost three degrees colder than last year.
“In March 2007, the average temperature was -2.7. This year, it was -5.3,” Mr. Phillips said.
“Last March, Ottawa had temperatures of 14 and 16 degrees. But this year it barely got above freezing, maybe a high of three degrees. What we haven’t had are those little spring teasers, what I call weather trailers announcing what’s coming. There were none of these little previews or spring rehearsals. That was really a blow.
“March in many ways was the cruellest month because it didn’t behave as it should have. It was consistently cold, and almost ensured a slow coming of spring.”
If you’re hoping for a bit of a turnaround, the long-range forecast for April is not encouraging.
“April looks to be cooler than normal, and that’s right across the country,” said Mr. Phillips.
But Ottawa naturalist Dan Brunton said there are abundant signs of spring – if you know where to look for them.
“Down by the Ottawa River, that’s where the life is,” he said. “The buds are bursting, the birds are very active and the whole landscape is waking up. The warming of the soil is happening, believe it or not. Rivers are where you go to see spring because they were the highways long before we made artificial routes across landscapes.”
Many migratory birds have already returned to Ottawa, Mr. Brunton said.
“The gulls are coming in big time, and the geese are really coming in now. A lot of woodland birds are coming back, getting ready to be in position for when the bugs come out. A lot of marsh birds are here despite the fact that marshes are still frozen. There are male redwing blackbirds setting up territories over chunks of frozen marsh, trying to attract some bedraggled females.
“There’s a lot of prep work going on right now.”
On his riverside rambles, Mr. Brunton has also spotted robins and crows, groundhogs and woodchucks, and skunks and raccoons.
“Animals that aren’t the deepest of hibernating sleepers, they are poking their nose out to see what’s going on. And retreating in horror,” he joked.
“We’re at the early stages of shaking it and waking up.”
Mr. Brunton is pleased that so much snow is still around.
“The really great thing is we have a very good snowpack that is protecting so much that is going on in the upper part of the soil. That is so critical for the forests, for our health and welfare and protecting the watersheds and all of that.
“It has been a very good winter on a number of fronts. I love this winter.”
However, even Mr. Brunton concedes that winter has been a long, hard slog. His family has a narrow garden strip on the south side of their home in Britannia.
“It gets a solar oven effect, so we always have crocuses come up really early, even in February. But not this year.
“One of my neighbours was particularly going nuts about this long winter and I promised her we would have flowers by the first of April.”
One lonely crocus came into bloom on the afternoon of April 1, he said.
“It was touch and go. I made it by about six hours. I think it’s the latest in about 15 years I’ve seen this garden come in.”
Now his garden is bursting with blooms, thanks to Thursday’s sunny spell. Spring, surely, can’t be far behind.