A series of atmospheric rivers are causing High Streamflow Advisories and flood watches along much of BC’s Coast.
According to BC River Forecast Centre Hydrologist Jonathan Boyd, these atmospheric rivers are being sourced from the Hawai’i area.
“So it’s a pretty tropical feed with moist air arriving and often when it’s sourced in Hawai’i it’s called a pineapple express,” he explained.
“It’s a combination of really heavily targeted, heavy precipitation events and then associated with warmer than normal temperatures for this time of year, and really seeing that through much of the province.”
Prince George received plenty of snow this month, with much of it rapidly melting over the past couple of days.
However Boyd said there’s just not enough to warrant any worry about flood.
“Part of that is just although there might be 20 centimeters of snow on the ground at low elevation, it’s equivalent to about 20 millimeters of rain and typically just the rate of melt that can happen on a snowpack is just lower than when you get really heavy rains,” he explained.
“Some of the smaller creeks or just the tributaries around the Prince George area are far more susceptible to thunderstorms in the summer where potentially it’s 30 or 40 millimeters can fall in just a one-hour period, and then in respect to the Fraser River, it’s still just not going to rise to the high levels, except for that spring snowmelt period and then the potential of having rain in say the headwaters of the Robson Valley in June when flows are already high.”
Boyd said the caveat is the potential for ice jam flooding.
“With the extreme cold we had for a couple of weeks a lot of the rivers up in the north did freeze and there’s always that question mark of what happens when it bounces back with the temperatures,” he said.
“Notoriously the Nechako River can be quite challenging potentially just with lower flows and a bit more of a meandering river, but I haven’t heard anything yet of ice jam flooding.”
Boyd added the snowpack levels in the Prince George area are expected to be similar to what they were on January 1st.
The BC River Forecast Centre’s next snow bulletin is expected on February 8th.
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