Warm, dry weather conditions in the Canadian Prairies are expected to continue during August, before making way to a wet fall, Drew Lerner, senior agriculture meteorologist with World Weather Inc. in Kansas City, said.
“I think we’ll be going back into a wetter bias later in the growing season, and it’ll linger into the early parts of the maturation phase, and maybe mess with the harvest a little bit,” he said. “But before we even get to that point, we’re going to continue into a bit of a drier bias mode. It’s not something that’s going to fester for a long period of time, though.”
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Lerner said rainfall is going to be varied leading into the last stretch of the growing season, with two very different types of moisture falling on the Prairies.
“Some RM districts are going to get pounded with rain and others are only going to get a limited amount of rain initially,” he said. “When we get involved with a wetter bias pattern, I think there might be more consistency, where we might see some regularly occurring rain and short periods of drying in between.”
“One is a summertime pattern and the other is more of an autumn pattern. We’re going to be fighting a seasonal change,” Lerner added.
There is one region in the Prairies that Lerner is concerned about due to the lack of moisture over the past month.
“I’m a little concerned about northeast Alberta and northwestern Saskatchewan,” he said. “I think that pocket hasn’t done well over the past thirty days. They got a little rain this past weekend, and that helped, but I don’t think it was enough.”
As for the short-term outlook for the Prairies, Lerner said temperatures are expected to stay warm, with severe weather lasting until mid-August.
