It's tough to have faith in Wiarton Willie and Shubenacadie Sam.
The early spring predicted by those famous Canadian groundhogs seemed like a distant fairytale Wednesday as most Canadians from east to west braced for another day of extreme weather. In fact, British Columbia is the only province to escape a winter weather warning today.
Residents of southwestern Ontario dug out from yet another large snowfall, which topped 20 centimetres in parts.
Toronto alone has had three times the average total snowfall for all of February and there are still two weeks to go in the month. At Pearson International Airport, 67.2 centimetres of snow has already fallen this month, surpassing the record set in 1950 of 66.2 centimetres for all of February.
That same storm system will bring up to 25 centimetres to most of the St. Lawrence Valley, which is under a heavy-snowfall warning.
But the big weather story Wednesday will be in the Maritimes, where a potentially brutal mix of snow, ice pellets, heavy rain and wind gusts topping 120 kilometres an hour – 140 km/h in the Wreckhouse area of southwestern Newfoundland – will move up from the eastern seaboard and merge with the system from Ontario.
In New Brunswick, the storm will be mostly snow, but in parts of Nova Scotia, the snow and wind will change to ice pellets and finally heavy rain – anywhere from 20 to 40 millimetres – as temperatures rise overnight from -7C to 8 degrees.
“This is a very significant event for the Maritimes,” Environment Canada meteorologist Geoff Coulson said.
“The system that moved through [Ontario] is going to re-energize itself now with moisture and energy from the Atlantic Ocean,” he said. At midday local time, the cloud shield associated with the Atlantic system stretched from the tip of Newfoundland all the way down to Florida, Mr. Coulson added.
“It is a very, very healthy system. ... It's just a massive area of cloud and precipitation.”
In New Brunswick, all schools in the Fredericton and Woodstock areas are closed. Schools are also closed in northwestern New Brunswick. In Nova Scotia, classes are cancelled in the Halifax region and the Annapolis Valley.
The same holds for the province's south shore and southwestern areas, including Lunenburg, Queens, Shelburne, Yarmouth and Digby counties.
Meanwhile, much of the prairies are under an Environment Canada blizzard warning as a low pressure system moves through southern Saskatchewan into Manitoba. Cold Arctic air and strong winds will result in wind chill values colder than -40 for parts of these provinces and northwestern Ontario.
Blizzards and wind chills are also forecast for parts of Nunavut and the territories.
With a report from Canadian Press
