Grande Prairie looked like a certain four-letter word frozen over on the morning of February 4th, with temperatures dipping down as low as minus 38 degrees, making the Grande Prairie region one of the coldest places in Canada, and the world.
Danielle Desjardins, a Meteorologist with Environment Canada explains right now, Grande Prairie, and really the prairies as a whole, are seeing a ridge of high-pressure coming from the Arctic, bringing extremely cold conditions along with it.
“We’re seeing widespread wind chill values into the minus 40s across the prairies,” she says. “We have a ridge of high pressures bringing in bitterly cold arctic air to the prairies.”
In Grande Prairie, overnight lows were measured at -38.6°C, without the windchill, planting the swan city firmly among the top spots for the coldest places in the country. As such, Desjardins says safety is paramount when temperatures get that low.
“There are a few things that can happen under extreme cold conditions, frostbite can occur within minutes, wind burn, hypothermia, so there are definitely things you can do to reduce the risk of those health concerns,” she says. “Layer up, wear appropriate clothing when you’re going outside, take breaks if you can, seek shelter from the outdoors, and keep moving if you do have to stay outside.”
“The best way is to take breaks from the outside and don’t stay out there too long.”
Grande Prairie has seen some “abnormally warm” wintertime temperatures so far, and Desjardins says the recent cold snap can be chalked up to a “pattern switch” coming from the Rocky Mountains and the Arctic.
“It’s interesting, it has been abnormally warm, it’s just an overall pattern switch,” she says. “What we had was the upper-level patterns, upper-level ridging over the Rockies, so that kind of ushered in all the warm air for an extended period of time, but now we kind of have an upper-low, which tends to bring in the colder arctic air, and that’s not moving for the foreseeable future, the next week and a half at least.”
According to Desjardins, the upper-level pattern changes are responsible for GP’s day-to-day weather, and unfortunately for any summer lovers in the city, the cold temperatures are likely to stay for “at least a couple of weeks.”
