Hello, everyone! Welcome back to The Weather with Connor. In this week’s column, I thought I’d do another Q&A, to answer some of your questions related to the weather. All questions are pulled from my Facebook comment section. Let’s get started.
Q: Does barometric pressure affect such things like migraines and arthritis?
A: Yes actually! The more the pressure drops, the more likely things such as headaches can occur. Drops in pressure can create an imbalance in the pressure inside of your sinuses.
Q: How is windchill calculated?
A: For example, say the temperature is -18, and the wind is blowing at around 25km/h. That would make the windchill -28. As the wind increases, it takes away heat from your body, which drives down the temperature of your skin and internal body temperature.
Q: Given the unseasonably mild and windy conditions we’ve had again this year, do you suspect we’ll have another major weather event like a tornado or derecho later on in the spring or early summer?
A: It’s impossible to know what types of storms will happen a month and a half from now. My educated guess is that we’ll have an active storm season, but that does NOT mean tornadoes and derechos all over the place. With a winter as snowy as we just had, all that snow melts and puts moisture into the ground, which is good for storms to work with in the summer. But again, we have to wait until it’s actually storm season to get a better idea on what the spring and summer could potentially be like.
Q: What is your best resource for accurate information?
A: I get the majority of my information from websites like weatherbell.com and pivotalweather.com. All of my photos I use during my forecasts are from weatherbell, but I look at both websites. Pivotalweather is used much more in the summer as it has better resources for severe weather events.
Q: What is the difference between freezing rain and ice pellets?
A: Freezing rain is just rain that comes down and freezes on impact, but ice pellets are rain drops that have already frozen on the way down to the surface.
Q: Is Twister your favourite movie?
A: No, actually. I’m not even a huge fan of the movie. Some funny moments in it for sure, but I’ve seen better.
Q: How long does it take you to figure out your forecast?
A: Some take longer than others. If it’s a difficult forecast with many precipitation types involved in different parts of the region, it can take up to two hours. However if it’s kind of a slam dunk with what’s going to happen and I already know what I’m going to talk about, those ones are shorter, around thirty minutes.
That’s it for the Q&A this time around. I’d like to do one of these every couple of months just to answer any new questions that you fine folks come up with, because there are always things going on with the weather and this is the best way to talk about it.
Aside from questions, just a few short points about the upcoming month of April.
The beginning of the month will remain active with systems coming through. There are multiple opportunities to have good rain days for snow melt, and multiple opportunities for days to be WAY above normal temperature wise. As I’ve said on Facebook, I believe there will be no snow on the ground by April 10th, just because of that rain and temperatures.
I will say though, temperatures do look like they’ll flip flop quite a bit from being above seasonal to below seasonal. There are no long stretches of time of having above normal or below normal temperatures, it’s all back and forth to start the month.
This concludes another The Weather with Connor column. Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you in a couple weeks!
