All-time records for precipitation in one month in Greater Trail sit poised to fall as the rain continues unabated into the last week of June.
The Silver City has been tarnished with over 180 millimetres of rain this June, according to the Southeast Fire Centre’s weather forecaster Chris Cowan.
And with five days left in the month, another 15 mm would put the total for the month down in the record books as the highest amount for one month since the centre began compiling data in the 1960s.
“Right now we are caught in the bull’s eye for quite a lot of rain, not thunderstorms,” he said on Tuesday while rain soaked into the already saturated ground. “It’s more of the steady rain and not the big bursts that we have been getting.”
Like the burst on Saturday. A string of five storm cells pummeled the region with 60 mm. of rain in one day, nearly eclipsing the average rainfall for the entire month of June of 66 mm.
But it was a typical weather shenanigan for the month of June, said Cowan, in keeping with its reputation for “cold lows,” weather systems that make the air unstable and generate a lot of showers and rain.
In the spring the atmosphere is very cold due to a cooling effect left over from the winter. Those blobs of cold air sit over the Pacific Ocean early in the summer, and in June they will “spit” in over top of us, said Cowan, making the atmosphere unstable.
“So over top of the heated air you get very cold air and that generates a lot of thunderstorm type of clouds, which is what we had last weekend,” he said.
The current system is a very large area, Cowan said, and is very deep off of the Oregon coast.
However, there is a silver lining for the Silver City. The system is moving fast and inland, and could be in Alberta by Thursday.