Why the Prairies Are Seeing Such Intense Rainfall
Lately, you may have noticed that thunderstorms across the Prairies have been packing a serious punch, dropping some extreme amounts of rain in a short time. In southern Manitoba, for instance, certain spots were soaked with over 100 millimetres of rainfall thanks to what are known as training thunderstorms. Now, this kind of weather doesn’t just happen out of nowhere—there are a few key ingredients that need to come together to create these heavy downpours.
First, the atmosphere has to be loaded with moisture. Without that, heavy rainfall simply can’t happen. Warm, moist air masses are often pulled in from places like the Gulf of Mexico or even the Pacific. When that humid air collides with cooler air, condensation takes place, and clouds begin to form. If the entire atmosphere is moist, not just near the ground but stretching way up, the potential for extreme rainfall rises dramatically. Scientists actually measure this in terms of “precipitable water”—the amount of rain that would fall if all that moisture were released at once. Even if a region has high values, though, heavy rainfall won’t always occur unless other factors also line up.
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That leads us to the second ingredient: instability. Imagine warm, moist air sitting near the surface while cooler, drier air hovers above. As the sun heats the ground, that warm air begins to rise. If it cools more slowly than the surrounding atmosphere, it will keep rising until condensation occurs, building storm clouds and eventually rainfall. This upward motion continually pulls in more moisture from nearby air, adding fuel to the system and often producing much heavier rain than the precipitable water values might suggest.
The Prairies might look flat, but even small changes in terrain can play a surprising role. Places like the Manitoba escarpment or the Rocky Mountain foothills in Alberta can force moist air upward, a process called orographic lift. Once lifted, the air cools, clouds form, and rain falls. This effect is one reason why some regions see stronger or more frequent downpours than others.
Storm dynamics—the way a storm behaves—also matter a lot. If a system moves quickly, rain falls and then moves along. But when a storm slows down, or worse, stalls out, the rain-producing mechanism just sits over one area, leading to extreme totals. That’s exactly what happens in those “training” thunderstorms—one storm moves through, another follows on the same path, and then another. From the ground, it looks like a single, endless storm, with waves of heavy rain separated by brief pauses.
Finally, there are convergence zones, where winds from different directions collide and force air upward. These zones can pop up almost anywhere and act as a trigger for storm development, often producing intense rainfall when conditions are already primed.
Put all these factors together—deep atmospheric moisture, instability, topography, storm dynamics, and convergence—and you get the recipe for the kind of extreme weather we’ve just seen. It’s a powerful reminder that even in the wide-open Prairies, the atmosphere is full of moving parts that can combine to unleash incredible amounts of rain.
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