Another winter blast on the way

Get ready for another winter wallop. Mother nature is gearing up to blast us with another 15 centimeters of snow and possibly freezing rain, something most people in the Golden Horseshoe don’t want to hear after the last ice storm knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of people in Ontario.

Many people are trying to clean up all the broken tree branches weighed down by the worst ice storm this region has seen in at least 20 years.

“Well this particular storm system is turning into a really messy one,” says Geoff Coulson, a meteorologist with Environment Canada.

Coulson says up to twenty centimeters of snow may fall in Southern Ontario starting Sunday and finish off into Monday with some freezing rain.

“We didn’t have an El Nino situation going on this winter or a La Nina when the waters in the Pacific are warmer or colder. So a neutral situation, so it left the door open for a lot of different possibilities,” Coulson says.

Those possibilities included 70 centimeters of snow in London, Ontario at the end of November, the ice storm just before Christmas in the Golden Horseshoe, and the cold snap to start off the new year in Ontario, something that initiated a phenomenon called frost quakes.

“Lots of moisture that we got in the lead up to Christmas during the ice storm penetrating the ground in to the soil in to the rocks and then a rapid drop in temperature caused that water to expand, then we get those booming noises.”

The next punch is now brewing in Oklahoma, and some people are preparing themselves better this time around.