It seems like one of those years. I definitely recall a few years where nice weather is on and off right into May. This is one of those.
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- Thread starter UrbanWarrior
- Start date
Shaka
New Member
Looking forward to first summer starting on Tuesday:
CBBarnett
Senior Member
Annoying as more snow is, this is starting the summer off with some well-timed, significant precipitation. Will help things pop off and get green quite quickly in a few more weeks.
Roaring Flames
Senior Member
The grass is already turning green in spots from all the moisture. If it warms up for a good couple weeks, the trees might start to bud.
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As soon as this snow melts the grass will be green everywhere. It was greening up nicely before the snow.
Mountain Man
Senior Member
Lots of green grass poking through the snow in places already, this next week will supercharge spring!
Albertasaurus
Senior Member
You must have gotten a lot less snow than I did, there is no grass poking through the snow at my place...
Pictures always do a good job of summing up the weather.
trtcttc
Senior Member
The article doesn't really explain what is wrong with this other than being incredibly difficult to remove.
Nothing really wrong with it per se other than being very invasive.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
I forget if this has been posted, but the federal plant hardiness map was updated last year, Calgary keeps moving up and up, consistently into 4a now, up from 3a only a few decades ago. Colours are a bit hard to tell, but the biggest driver is the lack of deep cold in winters.
Last winter our coldest night was -26.8C overnight, which is actually within the range of Zone 5a, almost 5b. Of course, the formal zone is based on multiple year averages, not just a single year but gives a direction on where we are heading with climate change. Pockets in the city with unique microclimates and heat island effects may artificially be even warmer. Will lead to a different era on what grows in Calgary and what gardens may thrive here.
You can see the model slowly creep warmer zones from the south and up the Bow Valley over the decades below. Cool stuff.
2025 (1990 - 2020 data):
2015 map (1981 - 2010 data)
2000 map (1961 -1990 data):
Last winter our coldest night was -26.8C overnight, which is actually within the range of Zone 5a, almost 5b. Of course, the formal zone is based on multiple year averages, not just a single year but gives a direction on where we are heading with climate change. Pockets in the city with unique microclimates and heat island effects may artificially be even warmer. Will lead to a different era on what grows in Calgary and what gardens may thrive here.
You can see the model slowly creep warmer zones from the south and up the Bow Valley over the decades below. Cool stuff.
2025 (1990 - 2020 data):
2015 map (1981 - 2010 data)
2000 map (1961 -1990 data):
Very interesting climate data. It would be interesting to see from 1900 onwards. When my grandmother was growing up in the 20’s there were very free trees. The rule of thumb then was only 3 or 4 types of trees would grow here. Russian Caraganna bushes were one of the few things that used to survive the climate.
Nowadays I see blue and pink hydrangeas around town.
Nowadays I see blue and pink hydrangeas around town.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
There's a couple good weather data sites that have some data on this. I haven't exported the actual data behind this to run any detailed analysis, but just a quick observation on this statistic of number of days per winter than have a -20C temperature. For a baseline, we had 19 days where we registers a -20C last winter.
The trend is obvious, but breaking it down. The last year where we had 40 or more days with a -20 was 1996, 30 years ago. Compare that to any other period of Calgary's history where more than 40 days with a -20 was closer to average, or at least every 5 to 10 years.
Another fact - the last time we had 50 days with a -20C was 1977. All 13 time we had 50+ days with a -20C were before 1977. We might never actually see that happening again.
UrbanWarrior
Senior Member
The last few years, I’ve planted my balcony garden in the last week of April, and haven’t had a single plant die or even damaged, and I’m on the 29th floor. So that’s something pretty cool I guess.