As of Tuesday morning, this April was the driest ever recorded in Saskatoon.
“With one day to go, Saskatoon’s sitting at two per cent of its typical precipitation for the month of April,” Environment Canada meteorologist Blaine Lowry said.
While the 0.4 millimetres of precipitation recorded so far this month would be low enough to seal the dryness record for April 2019, Lowry said a cold front approaching the city from the north Tuesday was likely to keep the record from holding up through the evening.
“It’s possible that if we do get some precipitation later (Tuesday), that would bump us out of being the driest April,” he said. “It would still be a very dry month, though.”
The average amount of precipitation for April in Saskatoon is just below 23 mm. Lowry said Tuesday’s cold front had dropped between two and five mm of snow in the areas around Meadow Lake and Lloydminster, but there was no telling if the system would even bring that much to the Bridge City.
For the longer term, Lowry said Environment Canada’s best available data suggested there was slightly better than a 50-per-cent chance that May could see above-average precipitation. However, he cautioned that predicting precipitation more than a month in the future is notoriously difficult.
Lowry said things were looking better in Regina and southwest Saskatchewan, where weekend snowstorms had helped push the area to just over 80 per cent of its normal amount of moisture for the month.