Last night’s storm was a little bit more intense than what Environment Canada had expected.
Meteorologist Bobby Sekhon says there was about 6 mm of rain in Kamloops, but that more than doubled to about 13 mm when looking east of the city. The storm, he noted, significant lightning activity as well.
“We saw many lightning strikes. About 200 in the Kamloops area,” he said. “On a grander scale, over 10,000 in southern B.C. So certainly a very active storm.”
He adds we saw wind gusts in the city up to 70 km/hr.
Sekhon says while the area doesn’t see thunderstorms when compared to the prairies, there may be a few systems that roll through the summer months that can bring a fair amount of lightning.
“So this time we had a pretty good active upper low that came through to act as a trigger for this lightning,” Sekhon added. “So it wasn’t so much to do with extremely hot conditions that created environment for thunderstorms, it was mostly this upper feature which created these elevated storms which can be a common trigger for B.C.”
Looking back to this past July, the province set a record for lightning strikes with 264,000. In August, there were 55,380 lightning strikes in BC, with about 2,766 in the Kamloops area.
Sekhon says the good news this summer was that this activity was accompanied by rain. Last year there was a lot of dry lightning which tends to lead to a lot more fires.
Did you hear thunder last night? There were over 10, 000 lightning strikes over southern B.C. last night
#BCstorm #Boom pic.twitter.com/XXrV1mJCOF
— ECCC Weather British Columbia (@ECCCWeatherBC) September 4, 2019
