It’s official, February of 2019 in Vanderhoof was a record-breaker.
The northern capital felt like a tundra for virtually the entire month with overnight lows dipping between -30 and -40 most nights.
Chris Emond with Environment Canada recently spoke with My Nechako Valley Now.
“We’re looking at minus five normally and this past February it was minus 17.5 degrees, which is a 12.5 degrees anomaly there and we placed it as the coldest February on record since 1943.”
It probably feels like forever, we’ve been in this deep freeze but Emond says we’re starting to warm up slowly but surely.
“We should see things moderating a little bit, still below normal though as our highs usually for this time of year would be a low of minus seven and a high of plus three and it looks like we’re still going to lows into the double digits according to the long-range forecast for the next five to seven days.”
The month was equally as dry, with just 13 millimetres of precipitation falling compared to the normal mark of 29, making it the eighth driest February on record.
When we take a look at the winter season as a whole, it wasn’t that much cooler than previous years.
“The normal would be minus six-point-seven and this year was a little bit colder with all three months considered at minus eight-point-eight, precipitation-wise for those three months, the normal would be a 127.1 and there was 110.1 this year, so the winter as a whole, not nearly as remarkable as February.”