Another rain record has hit the books in West Vancouver.
West Vancouver recorded 80.6 mm of precipitation during the heavy rainfall that came to B.C.’s south coast Friday, marking the wettest day on Aug. 15 for the municipality. The previous record was 38.4 mm in 1999.
On Thursday, Aug. 14, Environment and Climate Change Canada issued a rainfall warning for the south coast for Friday, including the North Shore, predicting up to 50 mm of precipitation to fall at lower elevations and up to 80 mm higher up.
Even more fell in some spots.
A weather station near Cypress Bowl Road recorded more than 100 mm of rain in the mountains, said Environment Canada meteorologist Catherine Aubry.
“It was way higher compared to the neighbourhood, more populated area,” Aubry said.
During last week’s storm, Coquitlam saw a whopping 95.4 mm of rain, Burnaby Mountain came in at 84.7 mm, Pitt Meadows was drenched in 64.6 mm, and Vancouver airport recorded 43 mm.
The heavy precipitation was due to a “moisture system” that brought a lot of rain over the south coast and even parts of the island, Aubry said.
Squamish and Abbotsford also broke rainfall records. Squamish was soaked with 35 mm of rain, surpassing the 14.4 mm record from 1988 and 55 mm of rain coming down in Abbotsford, beating the 18 mm record from 1999.
Aubry said it’s rare to see this amount of rain in August, but people can expect the clouds to clear up by Wednesday and hotter temperatures again next weekend.
“It’s a pretty rare pattern that we have for August,” she said. “[It] was a lot of rain we received in August, but it was well needed,” she said.
Abby Luciano is the Indigenous and civic affairs reporter for the North Shore News. This reporting beat is made possible by the Local Journalism Initiative.
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