While Baker Creek may be going down and the Fraser River is still not that high, Quesnel and the rest of the Cariboo for that matter,could still see some more major flooding this year.
That from Johathan Boyd, a Hydrologist with the BC River Forecast Centre, who says the upper snowpack has barely been touched…
“For May 1st, the snow in the Quesnel basin is at 130 percent of normal, that it’s a slight decrease of two percent as of April 1st, and that was really just a representation of a lack of snow accumulation for the month and not necessarily snow melt in the mid to high elevations.”
Boyd says that was more a product of a lack of new snow more than any melt at the upper level.
He says two sites are showing record snowpacks…
“One is Horsefly Mountain, which has 48 years of records, so the May first value of 712 millimetres of snow water equivalent is the highest ever recorded there, and not quite as long, but our automated site at Yanks Peak east, which goes back 23 years, is also at record high snow.”
Boyd says the snowpack at the upper levels likely won’t start to melt for another two weeks.
Here, he describes some best case scenarios when it comes to the weather…
-one would be just a lack of precipitation, so very dry for the next two months, and then seasonal temperatures where we just steadily have a the snow melt at an average rate, nothing too fast, and flows will still get high just because of the volume of snow that is in the mountains .
-Another positive might be to have two days of really hot weather and a rapid melt but then go back to colder weather where the melting stops quickly, and then have that happen a few times every couple of weeks
Boyd says a worst case scenario for flooding would be if we stay relatively cold, followed by extreme heat in the day and warm temperatures even at night.
He says that currently is not in the weather forecast, but he says they really can’t look further than about ten days into the future with any sort of confidence.