We may have had the warmest winter on record but it’s not quite over

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Winter, we hardly knew ye — in Toronto, anyway.

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Doug Gillham, a meteorologist for The Weather Network, said the months of December through February delivered Toronto the warmest winter since records have been kept.

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“It’s officially the warmest December, January, February — so meteorological winter — on record for Toronto, so it’s not your imagination,” he said.

With the official start of spring quickly approaching — on March 19 — it feels like we’re heading to home base, winter-wise.

“The weather is going to have some calendar confusion because it has felt like spring for much of the winter, but especially the last few weeks, and that will continue until about the (spring) equinox. The first day of spring will feel like spring,” said Gillham.

Still, Gillham cautioned, The Weather Network’s spring forecast was called “mild but moody, ” noting  Toronto residents could still face a cold and snowy winter blast.

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“I wouldn’t give that all-clear yet. We are going to go into a colder pattern for the final 10 days of March and into early April, so there’s the risk,” he said.

“You can have a cold pattern and not get snow, but the risk is there. Everyone’s like, ‘Well, take off the snow tires. It’s over. Did it ever even begin?’ Well, because my snow tires are on, I’m going to leave them on,” added Gillham. “It does snow in April. The problem is we’ve been lulled into a false sense of, ‘Oh, it’s normal to be in the mid-teens in early March.”

With the Weather Network’s forecast calling for a high of 8C on Monday, the temperature is supposed to jump into double digits, starting Tuesday. The forecast calls for highs of 14C on Tuesday, 16C on Wednesday and 10C on Thursday.

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Last Tuesday was a record-setting day when the temperature hit 16.6C, topping the 13C set on March 5, 1979, according to Gillham.

And the reason for all mild weather?

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“El Nino is why this year stands out (as mild) and it was one of the strongest El Nino events on record,” said Gillham.

“The ocean temperatures in the tropical Pacific have this back-and-forth pattern where sometimes they’re warmer than normal, and sometimes they’re colder than normal. And we just came from a three-year period where they were colder than normal, it was La Nina, and now they’re warmer than normal and that’s El Nino.”

Gillham predicted that while chilly weather in late March or early April will test our patience, by the time we get to “the end of May, we’ll see that spring, as a whole, was warmer than normal with this rude interruption.”

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