“It certainly was not a normal year, one of the craziest ever for sure.”
That’s how Environment Canada Meteorologist Doug Lundquist described Prince George’s weather in 2021.
According to Lundquist, Prince George was about a tenth of a derivable average from the ‘normal’ temperature for the year, because of extreme high temperatures in the summer and extreme lows in the winter.
“It cancelled out, so this is why I don’t like calling the average temperatures the ‘normals’, there’s nothing normal about the normals, because you can have a really hot and really cold, it’s better to call it an average.”
In addition, Lundquist said 2021 was the driest year on record. He said we had 426 mm of precipitation in 2021, compared to the average of 595 mm. He said the previous driest year was 2014. (Records go back to 1943.)
“The dryness was a concern in the Central Interior, and [PG] was number one for that, but the real story, and it’s the story of my career, I’ve been doing this for 34 years, and I don’t remember losing so many people as we did to the heat that we had at the end of June and into early July,” Lundquist said.
“I was travelling through the Central Interior through Prince George right as it was happening. I don’t ever remember seeing 40 degrees, and it was 40 degrees at Quesnel when we had a breakdown in our vehicle and had to try to get help. It was extraordinary and unsafe, and I don’t think anyone will forget it.”
More recently, Lundquist said Prince George recorded its fourth coldest December on record.
“It was about 8 degrees colder than average, we usually have about -7.2, it was -15.3.”
He added that it was pretty close to average for precipitation for the month.
For the first few months of 2022 in Prince George, Lundquist says we can continue to expect colder than average temperatures for most of British Columbia.
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