“We call it a Colorado low, it was actually a fairly complex system,” said Environment Canada meteorologist David Baggaleu about the snowfall Moose Jaw and the rest of southern Saskatchewan saw this weekend.
“When it moved to Saskatchewan it was more of just a cold frontal passage, and then it linked up with a Colorado low coming in from the southwest, it really spun up and gave southern Saskatchewan and southern Manitoba a whole bunch of snow,” said Baggaleu.
The system lasted most of Friday and Saturday and continued to cause traffic problems right into Sunday, producing up to 33 centimeters of snowfall just to the east of Moose Jaw.
“It’s a bigger snowfall event, we get these a few times a year across the prairies,” said Baggaleu, “these things also produce rain, freezing rain, snow, ice pellets; a whole mixture depending on the temperatures involved.”
The weather system that prompted Environment Canada to issue a snowfall warning for much of southern Saskatchewan also kept the RCMP Moose Jaw detachment busy as well.
“Our call load generally increases with storms like this because people are hitting the ditch or losing control of their vehicles and getting stuck in the snow and causing traffic hazards on the highway,” said Constable Cody Thompson of the Moose Jaw RCMP detachment.
Thompson said this is the heaviest snowfall that he has seen in the Moose Jaw area since he was stationed at the detachment four years ago, and that fortunately there haven’t been any serious or fatal accidents as a result of the storm. “We haven’t had a high number of major accidents. What has kind of saved us with this storm is that the temp was already well below zero when the snow started falling, so the ground wasn’t warm enough to melt any snow and turn it into ice,” said Thompson.
For the rest of this story pick up Tuesday's edition of the Times-Herald
