A tale of two storms

It seems that yesterday two of Canada's most important cities, Regina and St. John's, were hit with crippling snow storms.  Of course, these storms were quite different.

In St. John's/much of Newfoundland a very substantial snowfall was accompanied by strong winds and sizeable drifts.  Not surprisingly, many people throughout the province lost power - and there are apparently many who are still without power.

Of course, maybe the worst aspect of the St. John's storm (aside from the mass power outage and crippling snowfall) is the fact that for the past 24 hours the temperature hasn't been below freezing.  So all of this freshly fallen snow is in the process of melting or at least turning into slush.  Yum (especially if the forecast about lower temperatures later in the week comes to pass).

Not surprisingly, the way things played out in Regina has been a little different.

First of all, we had less snow and less wind (so our drifting wasn't nearly as bad).  On the other hand, I suspect we've had a touch less ploughing of side streets and we had side streets that already had inches of ice build-up so many side streets are almost impassable and will likely remain in a similar condition for at least the next few days.  Oh, and instead of the temperatures dropping to something that might allow melting of the snow the temperatures have dropped substantially.  It seems that a windchill of -29 is as high as it has been in the past 24 hours (when I was walking around in this weather it seemed cold but in retrospect I timed my walk during the warmest part of the day).

Anyway, while if I had to choose one of these two storms I'd likely choose the Regina storm it will, nonetheless, likely be with us a little longer than the already melting snowfall that recently befell St. John's.