Thursday, January 19, 2012

Deep Freeze

The weather here in Saskatoon has been fabulous, with the exception of one below-average week in November, all fall and winter. I tried not to let it lull me into a false sense of security, but it's pretty hard to remember what a -40C windchill feels like when it's consistently above 0C in January. January people! Well, as is probably evident from the title of this post, the bottom fell out over the weekend, and we are now dealing with ambient lows in the -35C range and windchills of as little as -48C. This is just a special kind of cold that I'm pretty sure you can't understand without experiencing it.

Locally, the 'deep freeze' is actually a term commonly used to describe the type of weather we are currently having. The freezers that most of us have in our homes, be they fridge/freezer combos or chest freezers, cool to about the -20C mark to keep your stuff frozen. While it is considerably colder than -20C at the worst of most 'deep freeze' weather events, -20C is definitely the cut-off between tolerable and unbearable for a lot of people, so they start calling it a deep freeze when the daily high temperatures fail to reach -20C.

The good news is that this cold weather is supposed to break between tomorrow and Saturday. The other good news is that we finally got enough snow to x-country ski when this crap blew in. The weekend forecast is for highs around -10C, and most of the ski trails around here should be tracked and set by then. I am looking forward to a weekend of x-country bliss, and probably at least one day in the boreal forest of Northern Saskatchewan. It should be an AWESOME weekend!

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