British Columbians bemoan cool, rainy ‘Juneuary’

While most of my fellow Canadians look forward to prime Canada Day barbecuing weather, I'm gazing out my window at grey skies and persistent rain.

Welcome to "Juneuary" on the West Coast.

The weather geeks forecast a sunny Canada Day for us as a reward for the unrelenting grey skies that lingered over much of British Columbia in June.

But a look at Environment Canada's weather map shows that promise is evaporating like a politician's campaign pledge.

British Columbians accept grey, rainy winters because summers can be glorious. May is usually pleasant and warm, and although the rain often returns in June it's also when summer sunshine really gets a foothold.

Not this year.

As the North Shore News reported, June has been significantly cooler and rainier than normal.

"We're on a bad streak here," Environment Canada meteorologist David Jones admitted to the North Vancouver-based paper. "It's not a very summery pattern."

This June's mean temperature was 13.9 degrees C, compared with the usual mean for the month of 15.2 C. Daily maximums reached only 17.3 degrees.

It was gloomier, too. For the first 26 days of the month there were only 133 hours of sunshine, compared with the normal monthly average of 229 hours.

And yes, it rained — 67 millimetres in the Vancouver area as of last Wednesday, compared with the normal 55 millimetres for the entire month.

"It's been weeks and weeks and weeks that we haven't been able to see the end of it," Jones told the News.

"The pattern doesn't look so promising in the next few days. We've got showers in the forecast."

The weather has had it's dark side, exacerbating the usual early summer flood threat in much of B.C., which claimed one life earlier this week and flooded homes in several areas.

[ Related: Family escapes dangling house in B.C. flood zone ]

It's also delayed the much-anticipated strawberry and blueberry crops.

But Geoff D'Auria has a message for his fellow groaning British Columbians: Get over it.

"If you've been here a while, you know that a cold and wet June is not new," he writes in The Tyee. "It's that bracing slap in the face we get after May shines her weak light on our pale and wan, Vitamin-D-sapped faces.

"It's the cold shower that wakes us up to the July, August glory — the kind of glory Lotusland myths are conjured from by those who suffer through never-ending winters in the rest of Canada."

Rain is part of the bargain we strike for living on the edge of a rainforest, D'Auria says in his introduction to the Tyee's essay of reader-contributed photos.

"Love the West Coast. Love the rain."