While it’s been fairly warm and dry in Kamloops this past January, it’s nowhere close to the record.

Environment Canada says 2019 was only the 15th warmest and 8th driest January on record.

The average January temperature in Kamloops was 0.2 degrees, while we saw 5.7 mm of precipitation in 2019.

That’s because of weather systems that brought in warmer air from the southwest, according to Meteorologist Bobby Sekhon.

“With that warmer air transporting into the B.C. Interior, we saw warmer than normal temperatures in many Interior sites,” he said. “Also, this jives with the fact that we’re predicting an El Nino winter this year, a warmer than average January, February and March for most of B.C.”

Normal temperatures for January are around -2.8 degrees, while we see on average 21.1 mm of precipitation.

Sekhon says this January was considerably different from the last few years.

“Last year was wetter than normal and it was warmer last year, but cooler than normal in 2017,” he added. “It kind of depends from year to year.”

“You can’t really draw a linear trend because there are different conditions happening.”

The warmest January on record was in 1992 where the average temperature was 2.2 degrees.

The driest January meanwhile was way back in 1891 with just 2.5 mm of precipitation.