“Enchanted Light | New Mexico” by Jim Crotty is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Spring and early summer have been good so far this year. It has been unusually cool and wet. The numbers haven’t been extreme. We have seen months at 125% of the average. The wettest, June, was 150%. We can’t say that it’s been twice as wet as usual, even though it feels as if we should be able to. I suspect that is because it has been so much wetter than the last few years, which have been quite dry.

I can see the effects right out my window. The lawn and trees and other plants in our yard are green and luscious, without the need for a lot of irrigation. The hillsides across the valley still have a lot of green on them, which is unusual in july. The biggest and most important effect, though, is the dramatic decrease in forest fires. In the last couple of decades there have been a lot of fires, many of them large and dangerous. By this time in July there would have been hundreds of fires with tens of thousands of hectares burned. This year there have been fewer than two hundred with less than a thousand hectares burned. That shows that most of the fires have been small, extinguished before they could take off. For that we can thank the weather for keeping things wet.

This isn’t what tourists expect to find when they come to the Okanagan, but most of us who live here appreciate ti.

rjb