Wet and soggy start to winter with storm parade for Vancouver Island

It was another soggy and grey start to the day in Victoria and for much of Vancouver Island, as another moisture-packed winter storm hits the B.C. South Coast, bringing wind and rainfall warnings with it.

“It’s something to endure, something to get through,” a lady walking along Dallas Road told CHEK News when asked about all the rain we’ve had lately.

But the precipitation we’ve seen since the first day of winter is anything BUT normal.

Victoria’s had 142.9 mm in just the last two weeks — that’s as much as we’d normally get in a month this time of year.

“This has just been incessant, with one storm after the next, sometimes with less than 24 hours between the storms has certainly made things very saturated,” says Armel Castellan, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Despite the first two weeks of December being relatively dry, rainfall totals for the month were quite a bit above normal for much of the Island.

But nothing quite like Tofino, which was drenched in a whopping 620 mm of precipitation.

“That’s 200 mm of rain above that it would normally see,” Castellan explains. “We haven’t seen that kind of total since 1998 which, incidentally, was also a La Niña year.”

La Niña usually brings more moisture and it’s kicking off 2021 with a bang, with 100 to 300 mm of rain forecast for most of Vancouver Island the first week of the year alone.

We have yet to see the cooler temperatures La Niña usually brings but that could change later in the month as the southwesterly flow changes to northwesterly, pulling down cooler air.

And that means instead of splashing through rain, it’s possible we might be shovelling snow.

MORE: Environment Canada adds new wind, rain warnings for most of Vancouver Island with storm approaching

MORE: Rainfall warnings, flood watch issued for parts of Vancouver Island

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