By Trevor Crawley and Gillian Francis
It's beginning to look a lot like, uh, winter.
The Elk Valley experienced its first major snowfall of the season beginning last week with at least 14 cm blanketing the area by Nov. 21 and accumulating at least 30 cm by Nov. 25, according to Environment Canada.
Environment Canada meteorologist Armel Castellan said that snowfall recorded at a monitoring station up near Canadian Rockies International Airport ranked among the top four heaviest snowfalls in late-November since 1901.
Brian Proctor, another meteorologist, weighed in on the likely cause of this sudden gust of frosty weather.
"A few different factors come together to produce the snowfall," he said.
"One is we saw some fairly cold air in place across the Interior," he explained. "And then we saw that 'meteorological bomb' as people have termed it. It was tracking up the Oregon/Washington coast up towards Vancouver Island, and what that did is it spread a cloud shield over top of the cold air that was already in place across the Kootenays."
The so-called "bomb cyclone" was a recent weather event that mostly impacted Vancouver Island and the B.C. mainland coast, with winds up to 170 km/h, equivalent to a Category 2 hurricane. A bomb cyclone is caused by rapidly dropping atmospheric pressure at the centre of a weather system.
With files from the Canadian Press
