Believe it or not, summer’s almost done. Needn’t worry though. Mother nature will throw us one last hurrah of lovely warm weather before she shifts gears into fall season.
Starting on Monday and lasting through Friday (Aug. 26) is a weather system that will reach maximum temperatures of high the high 20s after sizzling out later into the weekend, says Armel Castellan, a warning preparedness meteorologist for Environment Canada.
“We have a forecast that is stabilizing. The ridge is building on itself and is reaching its maximum peak of strength for Thursday and Friday,” he said. “After that we will start to see some instability, a similar pattern that we saw in the last two-thirds of June and two-thirds of July.”
Castellan added that those six to seven weeks were a very strong indication of a low pressure system.
This is not abnormal for the season, though last Sunday’s “blip” in weather was a bit out of character, bringing in heavy winds and rain mostly in central B.C.
“These systems spin around but don’t move very much, because they are not in the main circulation of the atmosphere. Now we’re going to go back to a cut-off low in the late part of the weekend,” he said, adding that it will drop the temperatures back to close to normal, or maybe even a couple of degrees below normal.
“We may see temperatures shift down to 18 C.”
For the region, July’s temperature was 16.1 a small dip below its normal 16.4, while precipitation dropped to 11.6 mm, compared to a 30-year average of 18.95 mm.
In August, the region averaged 16.27, just 0.7 of a degree above its usual 17 this far in the month. Overall precipitation however dropped dramatically from an average of 16.38 mm, to just 0.4 of a mm, or only two per cent of the expected average.
And whether that’s going to change or not in the coming weeks is hard to tell.
“We may get some rain. Not a whole lot of certainty there. From next week, the ability to forecast exactly what’s going to happen diminishes, as opposed to the next five days,” Castellan noted.
For the current time, what’s dominating the seasonal forecast is the sea surface temperature anomaly, which is above normal. As such, the weather will begin feeling more fall-like in the coming weeks, so be sure to dust off the umbrella and raincoat.
