By Ashley Legassic

Meteorologist looks back on major weather events in Kamloops during 2018

Dec 31, 2018 | 1:36 PM

KAMLOOPS — A ‘smorgasbord’ of weather is how some meteorologists have labelled this year’s weather across the province.

Environment Canada meteorologist Bobby Sekhon says that was also the case for Kamloops, starting out with a cold, wet winter before transitioning to a hot, dry summer.

“If I was to sum it up, I would start with the La Niña winter which was cooler than normal, and then we got into some blocking patterns in the summer which kept things hot and dry for extended periods of time,” Sekhon says. “Now we’re transitioning into an El Niño winter which is actually milder than normal. You can tell by that, that we’ve gone from cool to dry to now warmer than normal, so it’s been all over the place.”

The winter of 2017 and 2018 brought temperatures of nearly two degrees cooler than normal. Thanks to the La Niña winter, heavy snowfall came along as well, making February in Kamloops one of the snowiest on record.

“Kamloops saw 37.6 centimetres of snow compared to the monthly average of only eight centimetres,” Sekhon says. “It was the snowiest Feb. 17 on record since 1951 with 15.4 centimetres of snow at the airport that day.”

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The snow trend continued into March for the surrounding area, specifically the Coquihalla which received 28 centimetres of snow from two events. It didn’t take long for things to dry and heat up, though.

“We saw the warmest May on record, and the fifth-driest with only 2.4 millimetres of precipitation in the entire month,” Sekhon says. “This warm weather melted the snow and grew flooding concerns in the Southern Interior. Also with the dry weather and the warm weather, it was setting up for the fire season that we had in many parts of the Southern Interior.”

June and July were fairly normal in terms of temperature and precipitation. What was out of the ordinary — the smoke that blanketed Kamloops in August.

“In fact, it was the second-smokiest summer on record in Kamloops with 255 hours of smoke,” says Sekhon. “The record is actually from 2017 with 449 hours of smoke. Into August we saw dry and hot and sometimes windy for extended periods of time. This meant for drier weather and again this was not good news for the forest fire situation.” 

September and October brought with them plenty of rain for Kamloops. September received 50 millimetres of rain compared to the monthly average of 30 millimetres. Things then warmed up into November which led to a late arrival of Boxing Day for snow in Kamloops.

After a weird year for weather in Kamloops, things are expected to remain that way heading into 2019.

“We can expect on average a warmer than normal January and February at least, and that’s what our seasonal models are predicting as well, is a decent likelihood for warmer than normal start to the year,” Sekhon says. “With the El Niño winter even though we’re predicting to be on average warmer than normal, we can’t discount the odd Arctic outbreak or the odd snowfall event.”