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By Nick Nielsen

Dry month of April in Prince Albert and La Ronge

Long term forecast not showing much relief for farmers and firefighters

May 6, 2025 | 5:04 PM

The start of seeding has begun for farmers around the province while at the same time firefighters have been busy putting out wildfires in Saskatchewan, and it doesn’t seem like there is going to be much rain to help with the dry conditions in the forecast. The latest version of the forecast for Prince Albert doesn’t include a chance of rain until Sunday night at the earliest, and it could be longer before we see anything substantial.

Unfortunately this year is shaping up to have a drier spring and summer season, according to Environment Canada meteorologist Danielle Desjardins. A lot of that is based off of what our temperatures look like going forward.

“Precipitation is notoriously a little bit more unpredictable than temperature, especially given the nature of precipitation in the summer. You can have thunderstorms that cover pretty small areas and you can get a lot of precipitation out of one thunderstorm, so it can be highly variable with precipitation, but that being said our longer range models are indicating with pretty high confidence that it will be a warmer summer, but with less confidence that it could be a slightly drier summer as well.”

One of the models that Environment Canada looks at are the El Nino and La Nina weather patterns that go on down near the equator in the Pacific Ocean. El Nino patterns mean warmer temperatures at the sea surface, while La Nina patterns are much colder, and both of those conditions can have major effects on the weather in the Canadian prairies months down the line.

With the way things have been going near the equator, those models aren’t telling us too much right now either.

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“We were in a La Nina pattern over the winter which typically means colder weather for the Canadian prairies, but we have entered neutral territory as of April and we are expecting those neutral conditions to persist up until about August through October. There’s about a 50/50 chance beyond October that it could stay neutral, or re-enter a weak La Nina pattern.”

While farmers are hoping to see some rain to settle some top soil and help with the early portion of the growing season, wildfire season has kicked off in the last two weeks in northern Saskatchewan. The smoke and the heat coming off wildfires can have an effect on some weather patterns, instead of a violent thunderstorm it could instead reduce it to a more steady rain, but the biggest affect wildfires have on the weather goes back to the temperature.

“I’m not entirely sure how much of an affect the wildfire smoke has on that (precipitation), but I do know that when you do get that smoke and the haze, it does tend to bring temperatures down a little bit. Some if our models are saying it’s going to be, let’s say into the 30s, sometimes we’ll see temperatures stay in the mid to upper 20s instead, so it can actually have a cooling effect on the surface temperature. Now this can actually have a feedback because it’s a little bit cooler, sometimes it won’t give as much energy to these systems, so you instead of more explosive thunderstorm development, you’ll have a little bit less energy to feed those systems.”

According to Desjardins, Environment Canada has weather data for the Prince Albert area going back a full 100 years, and with only 12 per cent of the precipitation that usually comes down it makes it the tenth dryest April Prince Albert has ever had on record.

In 60 years of weather data for La Ronge, it was the eighth dryest April the area has had in that time. They’ve only received about 19 per cent of the usual precipitation they would get in a normal April.

“The graphics from Agriculture and Agri Food Canada having that abnormally dry to moderate drought area. So yeah, it has been quite a bit below normal for precipitation. Further north, it hasn’t been quite as bad but that that dryness has has been almost all throughout the province even further south into Saskatoon, Regina, it’s been quite dry the last month or two.”