Snow returns to Victoria after 1,785 snow-free days!

After a very long snow drought, snow finally returned to Victoria in December 2016.

It started with a light dusting on December 5 - about 2 cm, but not enough to cover the grass.  Then on December 9, Victoria received about 5 cm of snow - its first significant snowfall since 2012. Here's a photo of the Inner Harbour area taken on my way to work, around 7:30 that morning:

As is usually the case in Victoria, the snow didn't last long.  By the afternoon, the melting was well under way.  Here is another photo, taken about 4:45 pm, on my way home from work, and you can see that the grass is already showing on the lawn in front of the Legislature.  By the next morning, the snow had all melted.

When I refer to significant snow, I mean more than 2-3 cm and enough to completely cover the ground (and the grass).  The last time we had snow covering the ground in downtown Victoria was January 17-20, 2012.  That's 1,785 days without significant snow on the ground!  While official "snow depth on the ground" measurements were only made at Victoria Gonzales from 1955 to 1988, I'm pretty sure that is a record for Victoria -  nearly five years with no significant snow on the ground!

I noticed that some of the local media were referring to 1,000 days without significant snow, but they were basing that on the "official" record out at the Victoria Airport.  Unfortunately, the Airport gets much more snow than downtown - more than twice as much.  There was quite a lot of snow out at the Airport back in February 2014 (1,000 days prior to the recent snow) but Victoria did not get that snow.  In fact, here is a photo I took on February 23, 2014, a day when there was 21 cm of snow recorded out at the Victoria Airport:

In our most recent bout of snow, we did receive a couple more very light dustings (less than 1 cm) on December 12, and again on December 17.  But really, we ended up with just one day with actual snow on the ground (December 9).  That's sure a lot better than some areas up-Island and in the Vancouver suburbs, where there was almost  continuous snow on the ground for up to 3 weeks!  We are very lucky in Victoria, that so often we can be snow free when there is snow all around us.  To illustrate, here is a map from NOAA showing snow cover in our area on December 16.  You can see that the core area of Victoria has no snow, while there is snow up on the Saanich Peninsula, the Gulf Islands, all the rest of Vancouver Island, and the Vancouver area.