Today’s blog will be very brief. It’s about a weather phenomena we experience frequently in Alberta, most commonly in winter. It’s referred to as a “Chinook”, a low pressure system coming off the Pacific Ocean that brings warm weather. We first experienced a chinook when we first moved to Calgary in 1985. We were quite impressed to see our climate transition from winter to spring, overnight. The snow was gone, the ground was dry and the temperature had leapt from frigid cold to pleasantly mild in a matter of hours.
It’s easy to know when a chinook is coming. Its arrival is signalled by the sharp, leading edge of the front coming from the west. As I was driving from Calgary to Canmore last Tuesday, I couldn’t miss the unmistakable profile of a chinook front. I pulled over and snapped a couple of pictures with my iPhone. Here’s one of them.
If you’d like to know a little more about chinooks, look here to see what Wikipedia has to say…Chinook Wind