Significant Snowstorm Threatens to Dump Up to 100cm of Snow on Atlantic Canada Through the Weekend
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Despite Shubenacadie Sam’s prediction of an early spring Friday morning, it seems that winter still has its grips on the Maritimes for now. Since our forecast from Wednesday night, there has been increasing confidence that we’re looking at an impactful multi-day snowfall event for Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island from Friday afternoon straight through to Monday evening.
The low-pressure system has already begun to move into the region from the south and is slated to become quasi-stationary off the coast of Nova Scotia for several days, resulting in a healthy dumping of snow for Eastern PEI, Eastern Mainland Nova Scotia, and Cape Breton Island.
As the storm settles into its holding pattern overnight Friday, steady light snow will spread throughout Nova Scotia and into PEI. By dawn on Saturday, widespread snowfall totals of 5-20cm across much of the affected area. Yarmouth and Digby Counties in Nova Scotia can expect only trace amounts of snow and will not see much more throughout the remainder of the event.
The steady snow will continue throughout the day on Saturday, and it may become heavy at times in Eastern Nova Scotia. Overall snowfall totals for Saturday will easily be in the 20-40cm range from New Glasgow and eastward apart from portions of Inverness and Victoria Counties which will be closer to 10-20cm for the day.
A bit to the west, Cumberland County and south through to Halifax can expect 10-15cm of snow to fall on Saturday and less than 10cm further west. In PEI, Charlottetown can expect approximately 10cm on Saturday and closer to 20cm in eastern King’s County.
The centre of the low shifts east Saturday evening before the storm retrogrades back westwards Sunday morning. This will bring an intense bout of heavy snow and wind gusts of 50-70km/h over the course of the day and could easily create blizzard conditions in eastern Nova Scotia.
Snowfall rates could easily exceed 3cm/hr for most of the day across Southern Cape Breton and into Antigonish and Guysborough. In these hardest hit areas, snowfall for Sunday will be in the 30-50cm range, which when combined with the snow from overnight Friday and all day Saturday, plus lingering light snow on Monday, could result in total amounts approaching and possibly surpassing 100cm.
The snow will begin to dissipate Sunday evening for Halifax and westward, but it will linger for the rest of the province and PEI overnight and into Monday morning. It is at this point that snow will push further into Prince County and Southeastern New Brunswick for a few hours, bringing 5-10cm of snow. On Monday afternoon, the system begins to exit the region and the remaining snow will finally dissipate through the evening hours.
