Winter in April

Despite all the flowers blossoming around town, yesterday was a very winter-like day in Victoria.  The high yesterday was just 6.7 degrees.  That's more than 5 degrees below the normal high for April 4 of 12.2 degrees.  That's even below the average 7.2 degree high for December, Victoria's coldest month.  It was definitely chilly!  There have only been two April days in the past 50 years that were colder than yesterday.

It was also quite wet, with 13.2 mm of rain.  That's about 40% of the normal rainfall for the entire month of April.  It seemed especially rainy after the dry March that we just experienced.  In fact, the 13.2 mm of rain yesterday was almost as much as the 13.6 mm recorded in the entire month of March this year.

The normal average high temperature for April is 13.4 degrees, while average rainfall is 33 mm with measurable precipitation on 12 days.  Rain is recorded at Victoria Gonzales 11% of the time during April, while sunshine is recorded 52% of daylight hours.  Hopefully, we'll get back into our more typical warmer, drier and sunnier April weather soon!

March 2018 - typical temperatures but very dry

In terms of temperature, March was pretty close to normal in Victoria.  The mean temperature for the month was 7.6 degrees at Victoria Gonzales, just slightly below the 30-year average of 7.8 degrees.  The average daily high temperature of 10.8 degrees this year was actually right on normal, but the average daily low temperature of 4.4 degrees was below the normal of 4.8 degrees.  The warmest temperature of the month was 16.4 degrees on March 12th, and the coldest temperature was 2.0 degrees on March 25th.  On average, about one in every six years it drops below freezing in March at Victoria Gonzales, but this year was not one of those years.  (The last time it was below freezing in March at Victoria Gonzales was March 2009.

The chart below shows the daily maximum and minimum temperatures this March compared with the long term averages.  Generally, temperatures have fluctuated around the averages. 

Daily Max & Min temperatures in Victoria, March 2018

While temperatures were close to normal, precipitation was well below normal, with just 13.6 mm of rainfall at Victoria Gonzales in March, only 27% of the 30-year average of 50 mm.  In fact, this was the fourth driest March on record at Victoria Gonzales (with records going back 105 years). 

The chart below shows the daily and cumulative precipitation in Victoria this March, compared with the average cumulative precipitation.  Clearly, rainfall was well below normal.  There was measurable precipitation (more than 0.2 mm) on 8 days this March, compared with the normal of 14 days.

Daily & cumulative precipitation in Victoria, March 2018

Other locations in the region weren't nearly as dry as Victoria.  The Victoria Airport, which normally gets about 55-60% more March precipitation than Gonzales, had more than twice as much rain as Gonzales this year: 30.7 mm (though this was still less than half the normal amount at the Airport).   Other locations were even wetter, with 51 mm at Nanaimo, 62 mm at Seattle, and a whopping 142 mm at Vancouver Harbour.  Vancouver normally gets about 3 times as much rainfall as Victoria in March, but this year it recorded 10 times as much!  Below is a chart comparing March precipitation at several locations in the region.

Finally, there was no snow in Victoria in March.  This is not unusual.  The average March snowfall at Victoria Gonzales is just 1 cm, and there is no snow in March in Victoria more than 60% of the time.  The last time there was measurable snow in March in Victoria was 2009.