After a warm May that saw High Streamflow Advisories and Flood Watches in the Prince George area and around the province, the risk for flooding has diminished.
“It’s been a bit of an unusual year in the sense that we are through the thick of the snowmelt season, and the risk is pretty well negligible in terms of flood from snowmelt alone,” said BC River Forecast Centre Hydrologist Jonathan Boyd.
“The reason is that May ended up being essentially the hottest May on record for the whole province, and the snowpack for the Upper Fraser wasn’t significantly below normal, but it wasn’t at normal for the season. Pretty well all the automated stations across the Upper Fraser in the Robson Valley have pretty well run out of snow.”
He added there’s always risk for potential flooding if the region gets heavy rainfall, but it wouldn’t necessarily be for Prince George.
“It would be some areas near tributaries in the head waters, not necessarily the bigger river systems.”
Boyd noted that June is typically the month when the Interior has a reasonable amount of precipitation.
“For the rest of the month, it’s really going to be critical from both a fire and a potential drought situation that we do have rainy days,” he explained.
“Not just one day of rainy conditions, but potentially seven to ten days of three to five millimeters to really soak in and saturate the ground.”
Boyd noted he’s not seeing that in the long-term forecast, but he always takes long-term forecasts with a grain of salt.
“Whether they’re a little bit warmer or cooler, or wetter or drier than normal, it’s hard to know past about two weeks,” he said.
“But for this upcoming month, it is going to see a really drastic drop of the rivers, and in a lot of cases, in that Prince George area we will end up at the lowest level for this time of year, and even leading up into the melt season that’s what was happening throughout the province in late-March through April. we had lingering effects of drought from last year.”
According to the BC Drought Information map, the basins around the Prince George area is at drought level 1, meaning adverse impacts are rare.
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