No snow? No problem. How London's ski hill is working around a mild winter

With no sign of snow in mid-December and temperatures above zero, Londoners may be wondering when they can hit the ski hills.

But Boler Mountain in west London isn't letting a lack of snowfall stop them and has found an innovative way to make sure there's still lots of snow on their trails, manager Marty Thody told CBC's London Morning.

The non-profit ski hill opened for the season on Friday.

"It's a beautiful white blanket over six of our trails, and we have probably the most sophisticated snow production systems in North America," said Thody.

"We're able to make snow on what's called the ragged edge which we start up at -2 C and we hope the temperature drops from there and our production will increase as the temperature goes down, but most of our production this season has been made right at that number."

Since October, Boler has been using a snow maker that works in positive temperatures that are still continuing to produce snow, along with another snow machine that will be used intermittently once the temperature hits -2 C, Thody said. 

"It comes out like a little piece of hail, so it falls to the ground like a little egg and the outside is frozen but the inside is not quite frozen yet. Some of them land and stay a stone, and some of them actually land and break open and that's how you get snow knitted together," he said.

"It's incredible, Mother Nature's more efficient at it than we are, but we're able to get it done and if you drive down the road into the mountain, you go from one season to another. From green grass to white slopes."

Expect warm days to continue: Environment Canada

The snow machine may come in handy in the weeks to come as Environment Canada predicts the warm weather to continue in the London area, said warning preparedness meteorologist, Trudy Kidd. 

"This time of year, we usually expect temperatures to be around 0 C or so, and certainly it has been warmer," she said.

"It's definitely also been dryer than normal, we're about halfway through the month and we haven't seen half as much precipitation as we should have seen by now."

Typically in December, London usually gets just over 87 millimetres of precipitation, which could be a mix of snow and rain, and snowfall measurements are usually around 47.5 cm, Kidd added.

According to Kidd, the El Niño effect in place can be a contributing factor to the warm winter.

It's a naturally occurring climate pattern associated with the warming of the ocean surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. El Niño occurs on average every two to seven years and typically lasts nine to 12 months.

"I've been through El Niño several times but there's no question the temperatures are going up," said Thody. "When I first started, we wouldn't make snow till after -5 C and now we're lucky if we get that temperature, so things are changing but we've managed to invest and keep up on technology to combat the weather that way."

Kidd said there's a good chance of rain and possible flurries for the latter half of Sunday as a low-pressure system moved into the province, and if temperatures dip enough, there may be snow.

LISTEN | Boler Mountain's Marty Thody talks about starting the ski season on London Morning:

London Morning7:00It might be unseasonably warm, but there's snow on Boler Mountain

Boler Mountain is opening the slopes for the season. Manager Marty Thody told London Morning their snow equipment can still keep the white stuff on the slopes despite a warm December.