We’re still not in record territory for daily high temperatures, but the Cariboo is experiencing unusually mild weather these days.
Lisa Ervin, a Meteorologist with Environment Canada, puts things in perspective.
“Although our temperatures are 10 to 13 degrees above normal for the remainder of this week, we’re still not going to hit any daytime high temperatures if you can believe it. The current records we have to hit 11, 12 and even 13 degrees for daytime highs, and a lot of those records were set back in the mid to late 90’s.”
The record highs for today (Wednesday) are 12.4 degrees for Quesnel and 9.1 degrees from Williams Lake, both from 1980.
Ervin says we are much closer to records when it comes to how high the overnight lows have been, especially in Williams Lake.
“For December 26th the current standing record is 2.5 set back in 1980, and we had overnight lows of 0.9 which put us in 4th place. This morning we had a minimum temperature of 0.9 again, which put us in 3rd place. The current standing record is actually 2.1 degrees set back in 1980.”
Ervin says the mild temperatures are expected to continue through the weekend.
“We have mild temperatures remaining through until Saturday and Sunday. Into early next week I start to see temperatures dropping back down to near normal. On Monday we’ve got a high of -4, Tuesday a high of -6 and the overnight lows down into the low single digits trying to approach those numbers for this time of year.”
Ervin says the general trend for the rest of the winter though is for milder than normal temperatures throughout.
The normal high for this time of year is -4 and the normal low is around -12 degrees.
