NWT - The recent unseasonably warm temperatures in the NWT have been nice, but not record-breaking.

Yellowknife's Kristin Nowak and her daughter Faith Catholique took off their coats while visiting a warm Hay River on Oct. 6 However, her other child Tthen Catholique stayed relatively bundled up in a stroller. - Paul Bickford/NNSL photo

"It's not normal, but there is variability in the normals," said Al Skiba, a meteorologist with Environment Canada in Saskatchewan. "So it's not record-breaking, but it is above normal temperatures for this time of year."

Skiba said pretty much all of Western Canada has been above normal for the last couple of weeks.

"It's just this ridge of high pressure that's parked over Western Canada," he explained. "It's bringing warmer air right across the Prairies and into the North."

For example, in Hay River on Oct. 6, the temperature hit a maximum of 17.3 degrees Celsius, as opposed to the normal 6.0 degrees Celsius.

"I still can't believe it's October," said Yellowknife's Kristin Nowak while walking around Hay River. "It's never this warm in October."

Skiba said, as far as he knows, there have been no records broken so far anywhere in the region.

Speaking on Oct. 6, he said parts of Western Canada and the northern territories were expected to return closer to normal temperatures by the end of last week.

"That doesn't mean that it won't be above normal again," he added. "It might be just a system passing through, and, after that, it might rebound again."

As for whether the warm temperatures say anything about the coming winter, David Phillips, Environment Canada's senior climatologist in Toronto, said they don't really indicate anything.

However, it is natural for some people to think that warm temperatures this time of year mean a tough winter ahead, he said. "Oh my gosh, if it's warm like this, are we going to pay for it? Is it going to be brutal? Is nature going to come back and clobber us?"

Phillips said weather models do suggest this coming winter will be colder than last winter.

"The initial indications are, unlike last year, this looks like a colder than normal winter coming up in the northwestern part of Canada – the Northwest Territories, western Nunavut and in the Yukon," he said, adding that could be from the beginning of winter to well into February.

"We think that it may be more of a classic, traditional kind of a winter," Phillips said.

The reason for that prediction is La Nina, which is cold water in the Pacific Ocean, he explained. "It tends to produce for northern and western Canada a colder than normal winter."

Phillips, who is well-known for putting together The Canadian Weather Trivia Calendar each year, said last winter was one of the warmest on record in the North, with temperatures in Yellowknife more than five degrees on average warmer than normal.

"We've never cancelled winter in the North, but last year we came close to it," he said. "It was short and consistently mild. November wasn't, but certainly December, January and particularly February."

Phillips said the prospect of a traditionally cold winter may please Northerners because of concern about disappearing ice and shortening seasons for ice roads

"I think sometimes the best weather is normal weather," he said. "It's the stuff that we expect."

While Environment Canada's seasonal predictions are not always correct, Phillips noted they got last winter and this past summer right.

"Certainly, there's some science behind this," he said of the weather modelling system.

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