Is it really – I wonder – an inevitable effect of apparently unavoidable climate change… or does the west coast of Canada just suffer from wacky weather as a matter of course?
I ask because – as gentle readers may (or may not) recall – back in the summer we here in British Columbia suffered the most unpleasant and tragic effects of a ‘Heat Dome‘.
I will be completely honest here – I had never heard of a Heat Dome. As a climatic phenomenon it was a complete unknown. As it turned out I would have been happy to have made it through this existence without ever having encountered such a beast.
Why do I bring this up now? Because as I write we are heading towards (hopefully) the tail end of another weather phenomenon of which I have never heard. This one is called an ‘Atmospheric River’.
A what!?!
What the heck is an Atmospheric River? Well – Wikipedia can, of course, give us all the details – and here they be! To be honest, however, you will not really need to read up on this unpleasantness to have a good guess at what such a thing entails. It is wet… very wet… and it is in the atmosphere – until it falls on your head!
So – since sometime yesterday morning the rain has been hammering down pretty much constantly – and doing so with the sort of fierce determination that ‘gets things done’ (in this case flooding, mud slides, road closures, accidents and so forth). We have essentially been living on the inside of a cloud for the last forty eight hours and it is getting difficult to tell where the cloud ends and we begin. The situation is what might best be described as… wait for it… fluid!
Anyway – I have to drive down to College later to deliver a class and I am not really looking forward to that too much. it may be a bit of a hazardous journey.
Wish me luck!
Tags: climate change, rain, Victoria, Weather
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