2011 was an average year for weather patterns and events.
Winter 1966 - This is the current location of Sow’s Ear to dentist building on Lantzville Road. Photo courtesy of Brian Blood
There were a couple of heavy rainfall days, but the annual accumulation was very close to average. There were no significant heat waves or cold waves. Our annual precipitation was exactly 36 inches. The coldest day of 2011 was February 25 at -6.7 Celsius. This was the coldest night of a two week cold snap from Feb 16 to March 1st when it froze every night. More significantly however, it thawed every day. There were no days in 2011 with a high at or below freezing which is always a relief to gardeners of tender plants. The hottest day was September 8 at 28.9. Occasionally, September steals that honor from July and August. The wettest day of the year was March 13 at 1.36 inches. The only other days recording over an inch were November 21 at 1.19 inches and September 26 at 1.06 inches.
Perhaps the most anomalous local stat in 2011 was the .94 inch of rain on July 13. That is more than we often get in the month and is more like a Prairie weather event. Some long-time Lantzville residents described the downpour as the heaviest they had ever seen. My weather apparatus clocked a rainfall rate of 4.4 inches per hour at the height of the short lived deluge. The only other stats approaching the unusual, but not record setting, were the very wet March with 7.67 inches of rain and the dry December with only 2.6 inches. March was the wettest month of the year, which was unusual, but beneficial. It provided a late wet-season infusion of water into local aquifers just prior to the dry season.
The significant feature of our local climate is the relationship between the rainy and dry seasons. Any extremes in this pattern can be problematic. The six months from October 2010 through March 2011 yielded 34.14 inches of rain. The following six months from April through September 2011 yielded only 8.85 inches. It is not quite monsoonal, but it is significant. The wet season is really quite wet and the dry season relatively dry. August 2011, for example, could not have been drier; there was no rain at all.
