Autumn began at 5:43 a.m. Sunday and achieved a higher temperature than the last day of summer Saturday. The high was 76 degrees compared to Saturday’s 75. And not to be outdone, today’s high temperature is predicted to be at least 90 degrees with a slight easterly wind.
It will be short-lived. The strong, wet jet stream riding across Canada will slip southward enough on Wednesday that we’ll have clouds, perhaps some sprinkles and much cooler high temperatures. If we get any showers, it will amount to a tenth of an inch or less. We may not even get out of the 60s. The storm track remains to our north all week and tries to slip south enough to bring us soaking rain, but computer forecast models keep it precariously to our north.
In fact, southern Alaska and Canada have been hammered by one of the strongest atmospheric rivers ever recorded in the past 30 years or so. Some locations up there have had more than 12 inches of rain with flooding. It is not unusual to have this pattern in fall, but the intensity is somewhat uncommon.
September in Vancouver has only 0.32 of an inch of rain in the gauge this month while we should be at 1 inch for the month. Our average mean temperature is 66.5 degrees, 1.4 degrees above normal. A dry and warm month so far. The difference between our warmest high and coolest low spans 54 degrees. We had a high of 99 degrees on Sept. 5 and a low of 45 degrees on Sept. 21.
