After a brief heat wave that brought deadly fires to parts of southeast Manitoba, things will shift to the polar opposite for the long weekend.
There’s no beating around the bush, it’ll be a miserable day in Winnipeg today. As a potent low pressure system meanders through North Dakota and Minnesota, it will continue to wrap rain into the province while driving a cold front south. It will be a rainy day in Winnipeg today with strong northerly winds developing. Temperatures will fall into the mid-single digits this afternoon as those winds gust as high as 70 to 80 km/h.
Rainfall totals will vary across the Red River Valley, but accumulations will broadly fall into the 10 to 20 mm range with localized pockets of higher and lower accumulations. The main swath of rain will stretch from east of the south basin of Lake Winnipeg southwest through the Red River Valley. The rain will gradually taper off on Friday night as temperatures head down to a low near +2 or +3 °C.
Saturday will be a cold May day with northerly winds up to 40 gusting 60 km/h and a high temperature that struggles to climb into the 5 to 10 °C range. Skies will stay cloudy through the day. Temperatures will drop into the 0 to 5 °C range on Saturday night under cloudy skies. A ridge of high pressure building into the region will finally bring an end to those moderate northerly winds.
Sunday will bring more cloud cover to the region, but sunshine may poke through later in the day. Temperatures will climb to around 10 °C with east winds around 20 km/h. Skies will clear out for Sunday night with a low in the 0 to 5 °C range.
A Note on Smoke
Over the coming days (and weeks?) wildfire smoke will be an occasional concern for the region. Multiple large fires are now burning in southeast Manitoba and northwest Ontario, and their smoke plumes will move towards the region in any easterly or northeasterly wind. That said, it will be complicated to forecast for as the relative closeness of the fires means that depending on the conditions the plumes may be widespread in coverage or they may be narrow bands that stretch downwind of the fire.
Complicating things more will be the need to wait and see how the fires respond to this weekend’s rain and cooler temperatures.
All that to say that wildfire smoke may be a concern at times in the weeks ahead, if not for much of the summer. Moreover, these fires are ripping through cottage country, likely impacting someone you know.
The best thing that could happen is a stretch of cooler weather with frequent rain; we’ll see what happens in the weeks ahead.
Long Range Outlook
Heading into the start of next week, it looks like temperatures will gradually climb back towards seasonal values with mainly sunny skies. At this point it doesn’t look like there will be much chance for precipitation through the week.
Today’s seasonal daytime high in Winnipeg is 20 °C while the seasonal overnight low is 5 °C.
