TORONTO - Environment Canada's senior climatologist boldly predicted on Nov. 30 that the country was about to endure its worst winter in about 15 years, a season so miserable that it would be a stark reminder of what real Canadian cold feels like.

By day's end, after a deluge of media interest nationwide and some healthy skepticism over his forecast -- given that previous years had seen relatively mild winters -- David Phillips thought maybe he had made a big, embarrassing mistake.

"I remember when I saw the first (Canadian Press) story I kind of grimaced in a way. I thought 'Jeez, why did I say that,' " Phillips said in an interview on Saturday.

"We've never seen a story with legs like that one, everybody and their brother covered it and it was going across the entire country, everybody was falling over themselves carrying that story."

And so Phillips admits he's taken some "perverse" pleasure in the months of dreary weather that have many Canadians agreeing the winter of 2007-08 is one for the history books, even if it hasn't been record-setting nasty right across the country.

Phillips had said 1994 was the last time Canada had a significantly cold winter and this year had a chance to rival that season.

To date, this winter is the coldest in 12 years and Phillips's winter forecast is considered 70 to 75 per cent accurate, which he said is pretty good for a long-range prediction.

"It wasn't necessarily the perfect forecast but I think to many Canadians it was bang on because there was something to complain about, it was a tough winter," he said.

"And I must say, in kind of a perverse way I've been delighted in a way the way winter unfolded, I felt confident that it would."

The story out West has been brutal cold, while the East has been dumped with enough snow to break records.

One of Phillips's favourite stories of the winter has been the snowfall in Ottawa, which has the odd distinction of being the world's snowiest nation's capital and is very close to a new record that once seemed impossible to top.

"I must admit I thought that record would never be broken," Phillips said of the 444.6 centimetres of snow that fell in the winter of 1970-71.

After the weekend's latest dumping of snow, Environment Canada said the city is up to 410.7 centimetres for the year -- one good storm or a few small ones away from matching the record, Phillips said.

Even though the city won't set records for cold temperatures, Phillips thinks most people would say his forecast made at the beginning of the winter was pretty accurate.

"I think people have remembered that story and said, 'You know Phillips, you nailed it, you said this was going to be the winter from hell.' "

Phillips said he wasn't too worried about a backlash even if his forecast didn't hold up, because Canadians are always asking about the weather and always want to know the latest forecast -- even if it proves to be wrong.

"Canadians are very forgiving, if we'd been totally wrong and it was a milder than normal winter Canadians I don't think would have said, 'Well, they don't know what they're talking about,"' Phillips said.

"They'd still come back for more and want to know what our best models were suggesting."