Bundle up and put on the hot cocoa – after a downright balmy January and overall warm winter, get ready for a “punch in the face” from Windsor’s coldest day in two years.
The forecasted high for today is -10C. This morning around 6 a.m., the temperature was -17.3C with a wind chill of -29 C, and the cold weather is here to stay at least for the next week.
While it’s not actually that chilly in the big scheme of things – we do live in Canada and this is winter – it might seem unbearably oppressive because we’ve been spoiled for the last couple winters.
“That’s certainly the coldest moment of this winter or last winter,” said Dave Phillips, senior climatologist for Environment Canada. “Last year we didn’t really have a winter, and this year it’s been slow to come.”
“We’re wimps. We can’t handle this. We’ve been conditioned to warm with very little cold.”
Chatham-Kent police are urging people to keep a winter survival kit in their vehicles in case you get stranded. In that kit, police recommend you put an ice scraper and snow brush, a shovel and sand or something else to help with traction. You should also have booster cables, road flares, antifreeze, a flashlight and batteries, first aid kit, small tool kit, extra clothing, a blanket, non-perishable energy food, a candle and matches.
“All the look and the feel of winter had disappeared,” said Phillips. “All your snow fall totals are way down. That just evaporated away. So there was no look to it and there certainly wasn’t a feel. Then all of a sudden, oh boy, hit you like a punch in the face.”
What made it particularly cold this morning was the wind gusting up to 37 km/h.
“You’re producing wind chills that can freeze flesh in under a half hour,” said Phillips.
But even with that, he said, it’s not so bad. We’ve just gone soft.
“Today and in the next little while, we’ll have temperatures we haven’t seen in two years,” said Phillips. “That’s why it’s made it feel more brutal than it probably really is.”
When we’re complaining, Phillips said we should consider people in other parts of the country who have it far worse than we do.
“You shouldn’t feel sorry for yourself,” he said. “Think about people on the prairies where they’ve had two winters in one, where they’ve dealt with -50 wind chills. We shouldn’t be complaining about it. We should be saying ‘hey, this is Canada, we are the second coldest country in the world. We’re the snowiest country in the world, and we’ve not been challenged at all this winter or last winter.’”
Besides, said Phillips, our cold wave will be short-lived. By Monday, we are likely to see some thawing temperatures.
We’re also almost through the worst of the season. This is the “dead of winter” when we typically get the coldest temperatures of the year, so it will likely get better from here on.
“You’re not going to be hibernating or migrating,” said Phillips. “You’re going to be able to suck it up for one week and you’ll be out of it.”
“We’ve reached the halfway point and we haven’t been inconvenienced at all.”
When it’s all over, January will still go in the warmer than usual column. Phillips said 15 out of the 16 days before Monday had those “thawing temperatures.”
“January, in spite of this cold day, is well above normal because it was so dominated by this long stretch of warm, mild temperatures,” said Phillips.
