If you thought it was exceptionally cold in February, you weren’t wrong.
February in Prince George, just to hammer that point home, was the coldest February ever recorded.
The mean temperature only reached -18 C.
“We saw an arctic cold front come down at the beginning of February and it brought some cold arctic air which stayed in place for the whole month and still continued to give below normal temperatures,” says Environment Canada meteorologist Bobby Sekhon.
He says while it’s not uncommon for the central interior to have arctic air, this cold spell hung around for a long time, hence making February the coldest month overall.
However, there wasn’t a lot of daily temperature records broken.
“We had one daily record broken for lowest minimum temperature and that was on the 25 of February, it was -32.4 C,” says Sekhon.
As the month was so exceptionally cold it was also exceptionally dry. February was actually the eighth driest on record.
“We got 13.4 mm of precipitation and it was the eighth driest on record,” says Sekhon. “Most of that precipitation came on the first of February just ahead of that arctic front that was coming through and that was almost half of the monthly precipitation right then and there and we got into a cold dry stretch for most of the month.”
He says it the precipitation had shifted by one day, it would have ranked even higher in the dry scale.
Now that February is behind us and time is “Marching” on, Sekhon says we can expect temperatures to get less cold but for this week but we are staying below average for this time of year.
“At least for the next few days we are going to be below average still,” says Sekhon. “However, next Sunday we are forecasting a high of 4 C and the normal for this time of year is 3 C so that might be the day that we actually break past that normal high for this time of year.”
