If you've been rejoicing over the first taste of spring the last couple of days, a Senior Climatologist says there's good reason for that.

Environment Canada's David Phillips says it's been a cold winter in central Alberta.

“You’ve had just an indication to me, 15 days where the temperature has been below minus 30, you would normally see 8 of those so you’ve had twice as many cold days, your temperatures have been about on average from November through to March 2 degrees colder than normal and you’ve had more precipitation, and of course that generally is more snow”.

Phillips however does have a fairly positive long range forecast.

“We think the second half of spring is clearly going to be warmer than normal and our early indications are that it will be a warmer than normal summer.  So what we see, be patient, it won’t be as warm as you like it, even though it might be warmer than normal and then as we get through towards the second half of spring we will see a warm up and that will take us right through for a summer which we think will be warmer than normal”.

Keep in mind, we often see about 30% of our annual snowfall after the first day of spring according to Phillips, but he adds its typically good news for farmers as it’s usually loaded with moisture.