If food analogies are your thing, then environment Canada meteorologist Doug Lundquist has the perfect way to sum up this winter.
“It was a warm sandwich—the good stuff was in the middle,” said Lundquist, Monday, noting a few nearly balmy days in Kelowna mid-January broke regional records in the season’s centre.
But winter started chilly and is ending even chillier, amounting to a slightly colder than average season.
The seasonal average was -2.3 C this year, compared to the ten year seasonal average of – 0.7 C.
What was more remarkable in the grand scheme of winter weather, however, was precipitation. Kelowna may has spent the weekend buried under snow, but the season was a lot less wet than usual.
For all of December, January and February Kelowna had around 44 mm of precipitation compared to the ten year average of 100 mm.
What that heralds in the seasons ahead remains to be seen, but Lundquist stressed that the weather at the valley bottom and in the hills above is completely different.
Snowpacks at the Ministry of Environment’s last update were relatively robust, but the newest information won’t be available for another week.
Regardless snow won’t be on the minds of valley-bottom dwellers soon enough.
Lundquist said that temperatures are expected to rise to as much as 8 C over the next couple of days, then by the weekend we will be in double digit temperatures.
