Warmer and drier than normal.
That in a nutshell, according to Armel Castellan with Environment Canada, sums up the summer in the Cariboo.
Castellan starts off with the Lake City…
“Williams Lake is at 15.7 degrees average, normally it would be 14.8 so .8 degrees warmer, that’s 13th warmest meteorological summer on record. 77 percent of regular precipitation is 21st ranked driest.”
Castellan says Quesnel was only slightly warmer than average….
“Two degrees warmer than normal but just 73 percent of the normal precipitation, which was 40th driest on record, but those records go back to the 1800’s.”
Williams Lake’s records started in 1961.
Castellan says those numbers would have been higher if not for all of the smoke in the air from the wildfires…
“As you can also imagine that without the smoke present in the BC airshed as a whole in the month of August, the temperatures would have been that much higher, and we were predicting certain temperature records certain days that were four, five, six degrees cooler than normal due to the smoke.”
Looking ahead to what we can expect for fall, he says they anticipate temperatures to be only slightly above normal.
He also says it is much too early to say if Cariboo residents can expect a lot of snowfall in the next few months.