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Colby Cosh: Why dry, ultra-cold winter winds are named after Alberta

'Alberta Clippers' start in the Rocky Mountains and whistle their way across the plains, assaulting eastern North America with frigid air

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It’s good to get occasional horse-doses of intellectual humility, I guess. I was browsing the news yesterday when I ran across a CTV News headline: “Toronto under special weather statement as Alberta Clipper brings more snow to the city.” I grew up occasionally hearing this phrase, “Alberta Clipper,” from American TV-network weathermen. And you can imagine my Albertan reaction: a brief spark of enthusiasm at hearing our princely name mentioned by good old Willard Scott or Al Roker, followed by an equally brief spasm of consternation, because how the hell is it our fault that someone is freezing their plums off in Sheboygan.

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My operating assumption, you see, was that this phrase “Alberta Clipper” was a nonscientific folk coinage — something someone came up with just because “Alberta” was a place that sounded appropriately cold and distant. The “clipper” part seemed especially dubious and awkward. Obvious American coastal talk, probably from the Massachusetts descendants of whale-murderers.

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So CTV’s use of the phrase struck me as a new, or new-ish, wrinkle: now fellow Canadians are adopting this vaguely libellous terminology? That set me off on a grouchy etymological research mission, which is often where column ideas start out, but this one lasted a matter of seconds before I started to see maps like this one in actual peer-reviewed meteorological papers:

Oh. Uh. Huh. How about that.

In my defence, the phrase “Alberta Clipper” did start life as a folkloric coinage, albeit one by a Wisconsin-based meteorologist of high renown and accomplishment. Weathermen had noticed as early as the 1920s that fast, dry, ultra-cold winter winds sometimes seemed to originate at the feet of the Rocky Mountains and then zap across the continent west-to-east: it was Rheinhart “Bill” Harms (1916-2009) who gave them their accepted name about halfway through an astonishing Silent Generation life.

The cute coinage propagated amongst Harms’s fellow Midwestern meteorologists, but it wasn’t until the turn of the century — just yesterday! — that the Alberta Clipper began to be classified and studied as a “synoptic” weather phenomenon, a definable recurrent thing. Technically, a cyclone. Its Magna Carta (the source of Figure 1 above) is a 2007 paper by B.C. Thomas and J.E. Martin in the journal Weather and Forecasting, which has a list of 177 “Alberta clippers” with dates, times, maps and jargon that would trip up Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. “The forcing produced by synoptic-scale and frontogenetical processes can be separately diagnosed from a QG perspective by considering the Q-vector form of the QG omega equation.” Ah, yes, silly of me not to have considered the Q-vector form.

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Anyway, with the literature on the Clipper becoming more fertile with each year, it seems poor persecuted Alberta is stuck forever bearing responsibility for, among other things, Chicago being the Windy City. There is an element of unfairness here: as Thomas and Martin explain, Alberta Clippers are characterized by a relative “lack of available moisture” as they whistle their way across the plains. They only create super-huge amounts of snow if and when they approach and suck up water from the Great Lakes. (In the Thomas-Martin data, the median track of Clippers, which reach their height in December and January, passes well north of Georgian Bay.)

Still, my skepticism about the ontological status of the “Alberta Clipper” was obviously misplaced, for which I apologize to the rest of the continent. (Especially since, in Alberta itself, they sometimes originate as chinooks, which are a mixed blessing at worst.) If anything, we probably need to rein in the occasional tendency to misattribute Alberta Clippers to other provinces.

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