BRITISH COLUMBIA’S NEW CLIMATE REALITY: “This is the fifth year of a pattern of drought that used to be something seen every 10 or 20 years,” stated David Campbell, Hydrologist & Section Head, BC River Forecast Centre (June 2019)
Extreme hot dry weather has left streams and rivers across the province running low and that’s creating drought conditions more commonly seen in late July. “I tend to be kind of shocked,” David Campbell said. “All of the rivers across the province are extremely low for this time of year. We are coming into conditions that we haven’t really seen at all — or certainly not that often.” That has elevated concerns about already vulnerable salmon that need the tributaries to get into the rivers to spawn in late summer, when the drought is expected to be at its worst.