It looks like Mother Nature is spending the weekend reintroducing the southwest to winter weather.

Different forms of precipitation are expected to continue throughout today and it will be joined by strong wind gusts as well.

Blaine Lowry, a meteorologist with Environment Canada, said a strong cold front will be pushing its way into the area today, bring with it some hectic weather.

"The real story is with this cold front is you're going to get quite strong winds today in the late morning through the afternoon hours with gusts in the 80 to 90 kilometre per hour range out of the northwest," he said. "Accompanied by some rain-snow mix changing to snow, that could give some reduced visibilities as that cold front comes through."

Lowry said he expects the 90 kilometres per hour winds to hit the region first before the gusts slow up to 70 to 80 kilometres per hour.

While the precipitation begins to turn into snow today, the mercury will be dropping rapidly from a daytime high of 2 C to -15 C within a 12-hour stretch.

"Behind that cold front it ushers in some arctic air into the region and that will stay with us through the week," Lowry said. "The next real chance for snow looks to be on Wednesday, but there are no guarantees on that at this juncture anyway."

Beginning today and running until next weekend at least, Environment Canada isn't expecting the temperature to rise above -10 C mark.