Southern Alberta will experience fall, summer and winter-like weather this week with a midweek warmup and then a weekend cooldown. Tuesday will see seasonal conditions with temperatures between 12 C and 0 C and mainly sunny conditions. A building ridge of high pressure will hover over Alberta and B.C. mid-week. It will push daytime highs around 20 C in southern Alberta, with clear and calm conditions. That ridge will slowly move east over the next couple of days, and a colder air mass from the north and a moisture-laden system from the west will slide in and combine over central and southeastern British Columbia on Thursday, before tracking over the Rockies into Alberta early Friday. Rain will transition to snow, with higher elevation locations and areas around the northern Foothills expecting snow earlier than in central and southern Alberta. The corridor between the Yellowhead Highway and the TransCanada Highway – including the QEII Highway – is likely to record the highest precipitation totals, but this could change depending on where the low enters the province and how far east it gets before starting to slide to the south. Calgary could see some rain, mixed precipitation and/or snow, but with warmer surface temperatures, any frozen precipitation (snow or ice) should melt on contact on manmade surfaces, so road conditions are not expected to be significantly impacted in the city. Temperatures will drop quickly though going from 17 C in Calgary on Thursday to 6 C on Friday, with Friday’s high likely to occur early in the day. Persistent cold air will settle over Alberta at the start of the weekend, and daytime highs will range from 1 C to 5 C from Saturday through to next Thursday. The normal high in Calgary this time of year is 11 C with a low of 2 C.
