If you just looked at the numbers, 2012 weather was slightly warmer than usual and had lots of rain.
To meteorologist Doug Lundquist, a Kelowna resident for the past 20 years, 2012 weather was "awesome."
The second half of the year was warmer than usual and included virtually no rain for two-and-a-half months, he noted Thursday.
"We're close to the warmest in the country with just a few coastal B.C. locations surpassing us and maybe a couple of places in Southern Ontario. That being said, when you look at the way the year went, we were really cold in the spring up until about the beginning of July, and then really warm from July right up until now."
The amount of precipitation was "incredible," he said, with record rainfall in June boosting the annual total in Penticton to 487 millimetres, 177 mm more than normal.
"That was all basically May through June, and then again from October through to early November.
"Then we had all of August, all of September and the first part of October, two-and-a-half months of sun and very little precipitation. If we would have had normal rainfall in August and September, we would have been way over the top."
Lundquist prefers to use Penticton and Kamloops weather numbers when discussing Interior weather trends because they have longer-term records and more consistent. Both are U.S. National Weather Service sites, he noted. Penticton is also representative of weather in Kelowna, where the yearly
average would be about one-half degree cooler.
Lundquist takes the highs and lows of each day for a daily average, then averages those for all 365 days of the year. To compensate for leap year, he didn't count Jan. 1, 2012.
Penticton was 9.6 C, 0.4 degrees above the normal average of 9.2 C. The average normal high for every day of the year is 14.6 C and the low 3.6 C.
The standard deviation in Penticton is 0.7 degrees "so that means we're pretty close to
average," said Lundquist.
By comparison, Kamloops was 1.1 degree above its 8.8 C average and its precipitation was 299 mm, only 39 mm more than normal. Kamloops had the same dry spell in August through October.
Waters off the eastern Pacific Ocean were colder than average in 2012 so some coastal locations were below average for the year in temperature.
Vancouver averaged 10.1 C for the year, slightly above its 9.8 C average. Victoria was 0.2 degrees above its 9.7 C average. Tofino was 0.6 degrees below the average 9.1 C.
Kelowna's average temperature for a warm December was -0.9 C compared to the normal -2.9 C. The average high was 2.5 C (normal 0.6 C) and the average low was -4.4 (normal -6.4 C).
The weather station maintained by a private contractor at UBC Okanagan received 30 centimetres of snow compared to the normal 36 cm at Kelowna International Airport.
UBCO had four millimetres
of rain compared to the normal nine mm.