It's been a wet and windy spring so it has many Cochranites wondering what kind of weather is in store for us this summer. 

Jack Burnett with the Old Farmer's Almanac says they're predicting a long and hot summer. 

"The Old Farmer's Almanac Canadian Edition has been doing this for 228 years. So we applied all of those centuries of expertise to determine that the summer in Cochrane is really going to be a rather hot one."

Burnett says "The forecast for the prairies is hotter than normal and wetter than normal. But that doesn't apply to Alberta. We see Alberta to be ever-so-slightly drier than normal over the course of the summer. That's for June, July, August and into September." 

Even though we've had quite a few cool and rainy days in Cochrane this June, Burnett says things will turn around soon. 

"We're seeing June to be two degrees hotter, July one degree hotter, August actually one degree cooler but in the world of weather that's almost nothing and September, two degrees warmer."

Warning Prepardeness Meteorologist with Environment Canada, Blaine Lowry's predictions for the summer are similar.

He says "One thing to keep in mind is June is climatologically the wettest month for the Calgary and surrounding area so in that sense it's not unusual to have precipitation in the month of June."

Lowry says they're predicting a typical summer this year. 

"The seasonal outlook from CMC, which is the modelling division for Environment Canada, is indicating kind of a normal summer for Cochrane and other areas around Calgary."

We've had a lot of days lately with strong winds.

As far as wind goes, Cochrane is prone to a lot of windy days but Environment Canada doesn't track wind.

"We don't actually keep climate stats on wind speed and stuff like that but we do have some data on directions and as you can imagine westerly and northerly are the two most common in the Cochrane area. We've been hearing this a lot lately, people kind of anecdotally noting that maybe it's been a bit windier than normal this spring."

Lowry says that huge storm last weekend that caused millions of dollars worth of hail damage in Calgary completely missed us. 

"The city got hit particularly hard with very large hail and copious amounts of rain that lead to drainage issues there. In Cochrane the storms just didn't develop as strongly over that region and the storm motion on Saturday was from south to the north. So the storm that developed over Calgary moved off to the north and then didn't impact the Cochrane area. In a way, Cochrane dodged a bullet."

If it seems to you that it's a wetter than normal June this year, you're right. 

There is also more complaints about the abundance of mosquitoes in Cochrane this year and Lowry says the additional moisture could be to blame.

Lowry says "For Calgary International for instance it was the 13th wettest May on record so in that aspect there is possibly additional moisture as opposed to normal around the region. It was a wet May."