You wouldn’t know it by looking outside, but according to an Environment Canada weather station in Jasper, this winter has been one of the driest in the past ten years and is well below the 40-year historical averages.

According to the Jasper warden station weather data collector, there have only been 36.9 mm of precipitation in Jasper from November 2009 to February 2010. While this is not as low as the same time period over 2008-2009 (34.0 mm), it is the second-lowest precipitation amount for the past 11 years.

Precipitation is significantly below the average of 92.2 mm for 1971-2000.

Other Environment Canada data shows that things have been very dry in Jasper this winter.

Statistics for the climate region dubbed the Northwestern forest, which stretches from the northern sections of the Rockies across the topmost sections of the Prairies and which includes Jasper, state that this was the third driest winter since 1948, with levels falling 43 per cent below normal. The southern B.C. mountains experienced their driest winter on record, falling 55.9 per cent below normal levels.

Furthermore, the numbers seem in line with Environment Canada statistics nationwide, which found that on average, Canada experienced one of its driest winters in 63 years. Across the nation, the wet stuff fell at levels 22 per cent lower than normal. Preliminary data also suggests that temperatures were 4 degrees C above normal, which makes this the warmest Canadian winter on record since nationwide records began in 1948.

“It really is the tale of two sides of winter,” says Bill McMurtry, an Environment Warning Preparedness Meteorologist in Edmonton. He said that winter in Alberta in 2009/10 came in with a fury in November, when areas like Jasper experienced extremely large dumps of snow, but then went out with a whimper leading up to March.

As indicated by the recent weather, winter is not dead yet and mother nature can still deliver some fresh snow. But for long sections of this winter in Jasper and in Canada, winter was abnormal.

“It has been relatively dry through the past several months across Alberta,” he said. “December was our winter, essentially.”

Still, McMurtry warns that the “all across” Canada temperature highs and lack of precipitation should not be taken as gospel that winter is all but dead in Canada. The numbers skew very low because winter in large sections of the Arctic was one of the warmest that he can recall.

He also said that while overall, the country was warmer and drier than normal, there were certain sections — on the Prairies and in the Maritimes in particular — that bucked the trend and went colder and wetter than average.

Furthermore, he cautioned against trusting the findings of the automatic Jasper weather station too much. He said the 15 cm wide, 50 cm deep tub that collects snow at the station could become clogged or blocked off and improperly record how much precipitation came down.

Overall, McMurtry said that tracking the weather is a difficult job, fraught with anomalies.

“There’s no question it’s been drier and warmer than normal [in Alberta], but I’d caution how much we can really read into this,” said McMurtry. “It is very dangerous to develop any type of long term climate change conclusions based on a single location.”

Greg Pearce, a forecaster technologist with Environment Canada says that some of the blame for the warm winter can be attributed to El Niño, the tropical weather pattern that starts in the Pacific Ocean.

Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States have found that this year’s El Niño is probably the strongest in a decade.

As the unusually warm sea surface temperatures in the western Pacific move east, heating patterns in the atmosphere change. This in turn pulls the Pacific jet stream, and its moisture used to create precipitation, further south. This means that in the southwest part of the United States, especially in California and Central America, there have been an unusually large amount of rainstorms this winter.

For the Pacific northwest, however, all the way over into Alberta, the opposite is taking place, said Pearce.