Environment Canada's Senior Climatologist David Phillips is out with his seasonal weather predictions as we enjoy the first full day of spring.

On the heels of what Phillips calls a colder than normal winter with a normal amount of snow, he offers his suggestions on what we can expect of spring temperatures “normal to maybe a little warmer than normal, somewhere in that range. Not as nice as last year, you had your warmest spring on record last year, too much to expect that to come again. It certainly won’t be bad, it will be slow beginning, little up and down, back and forth but as we get into April and May we think temperatures will turn out to be warmer than normal”.

Phillips says by all accounts it looks like spring will be good to the local farming community “the soil moisture from the winter snows from the well saturated soil going into the winter is good, the drought word is not being used, certainly by seeding time that warmer than normal promise from a temperature point of view I think will be favourable. It may not be a bright and early getting onto the fields, but I don’t think there will be any delay there”.

Long range, looking ahead, Phillips has a few sentiments for summer “it looks like it’s going to be warmer than normal. You know I wouldn’t bet the family farm on it, but my sense is the models seem to suggest that’s the case and I feel a little bit more confident because the Americans seem to say the same thing about their western part of their country and sometimes that spills over into Canada. So I am putting my few loonies on the fact that the summer will be warmer than normal”.

Phillips says it's been a colder than average March, but we will start to warm up later in the week with temperatures in the high single digits.