Cool & wet weekend forecast for Montreal

September has come to an end, as quickly as the rest of the months in 2014. This year is really flying by as is our weather. After a perfect weekend, it has been a rather sloppy week. Ideally high pressure was supposed to bring us sunshine and warm temperatures, however a northeast wind has maintained a layer of stratus clouds over southern Quebec. The low angled fall sun has been unable to burn of the marine layer and thus it has remained cloudy. The cloud cover and light northeast flow has also managed to lower the temperatures with highs generally from 15 to 17C (59-63F). There is some hope that the clouds will burn off today, but as I write this blog, it remains cloudy here in Ville St. Laurent and only 12C (54F).

With September in the history books we can now take a look at the weather stats for the month. Basically we started off very warm, turned very cold in the middle days with an early frost in the suburbs and warmed a little at the end. The high temperature at Trudeau Airport was 31C (88F), low 1.2C (33F). The monthly average was 15.8C (59F) compared to the long term average of 15.5C (58F). The airport recorded 50mm (2 inches) of rain, well below the normal of 83.1mm. As a matter of fact it has been very dry for the last two weeks. Here on L'Ile Perrot my numbers are very close, high 32C (90F) the low 1.2C (33F) with an average of 16.1C (61F). I did have more rain with a couple of thunderstorms occurring here that missed the airport, recording 67.8mm.

Whitehorse in the Yukon has had a snowy week with over 10cm (4 inches) accumulating. It remains very cold across the far north and some of that air will slip south into the central Great Lakes this weekend.

The weekend at this time looks more like October with clouds, colder weather in the middle teens, and a decent rain on Saturday, perhaps as much as 25mm. The culprit will be a strong cold front slipping southeast through Ontario and into Quebec on Saturday. This front has some really cold air behind it, below freezing across the Yukon and the Northwest Territories/Nunavut. There has even been a decent snowfall across portions of the Yukon including Whitehorse, and it is snowing in Yellowknife this morning. Winds have been very strong as well. We won't see snow but temperatures will drop into the lower teens and upper single digits over the weekend and the early portion of next week with lows down to 5C.