Pentictonites can breathe a collective sigh of relief. After record-breaking rainfall in June, it looks like summer has finally arrived.
The current Environment Canada forecast for the next five days is looking hot, with temperatures hovering around the low-to-mid 30-degree range.
George Bishop has been running Pier Water Sports on Okanagan Lake for 15 years, and said last month’s weather was unprecedented — and it affected business.
“I’ve never seen a June this bad before,” he said. “The weather was just so bad you couldn’t go out and do water sports.”
However, some locals appreciated the constant rainfall last month saw.
“I like it a little cooler, so it wasn’t a problem for me,” said resident Joan Belanger.
“We’re glad to see the rain gone, but it’s always nice to see everything green. And now that it’s here, we’re down here soaking it up,” added her husband Paul, while sitting on the shores of Okanagan Lake.
Doug Lundquist, a meteorologist with Environment Canada, said last month’s rainfall was quite high for the area — so high, in fact, that it broke a local rainfall record.
Lundquist said he usually relies on a monitoring station at the Penticton airport to measure rainfall, which has records going back to the ’40s. However, he said, some of his colleagues also measured the rainfall against another monitoring station in Penticton, with this one dating back much further. June’s 97.1 millimetres of rainfall even broke the second station’s 1913 record of 97.0 mm.
“It’s our monsoon season, June is the wettest month of the year, so that wasn’t that unusual,” he explained. “It’s just that there was more upper low-pressure systems this year than usual, and there were more intense rainfalls at times, so those two things added together to push the record over the top in the Penticton area.”
However, Lundquist said people can put away their umbrellas and break out the sunscreen — summer has finally come.
People should get used to seeing the kind of weather Penticton is going to be experiencing over the next few days, said Lundquist. His outlook, which is reliable until Aug. 15, shows a 90 per cent chance of above-average temperatures.