As covered previously by The Capital, a warming climate is expected to transform Victoria into a city with more heat waves, more violent storms and higher seawalls. Less well known is how much of the local climate has already shifted. According to archival data

The weather data below, provided to The Capital by Canadian weather historian Rolf Campbell, was all gathered at what is now Victoria International Airport, with the first recording made on August 1st, 1940. As Campbell’s graphs illustrate, even 80 years ago Victoria was a much colder and snowier place.

Campbell is also the creator of Victoria Weather Records, an incredibly informative Twitter account compiling daily updates on how Victoria is stacking up against its weather history. Follow it at this link.

When the first soldiers from Victoria embarked east for battlefields in the Second World War, they were leaving a city that, on average, was 0.9 degrees colder than it is now. By global standards, this is a massive shift. According to the NASA Earth Observatory, earth temperatures as a whole have warmed by only 0.8 degrees since 1880. Victoria has thus warmed faster in a much shorter span of time. Compared to the rest of Canada, however, Victoria’s warming is comparatively manageable. Natural Resources Canada estimates that the country as a whole has warmed an average of 1.3 degrees since 1948, and that Canada continues to warm at twice the global rate. With warming being felt most dramatically in colder areas, this means that regions adjoining coastal B.C. have seen temperatures rise more than three times as fast as Victoria. In parts of Banff National Park, it is now up to 3.6 degrees hotter than it was in 1950.

Warmer temperatures naturally mean fewer snow days, to the point where the city sees 14 fewer centimetres of snow than it did 80 years ago. The region-wide decrease in snowfall has been felt most acutely on Mount Washington, where ski seasons can now be as short as two weeks. According to an analysis by UBC, by the end of the century Mount Washington will be too warm to support any skiing at all. Victoria will still be walloped by the occasional city-seizing snowstorm (note the recent spikes in 1996 and 2008), but the trend is towards a city where an annual dusting of snow is the exception, rather than the norm. There are only two completely snow-free years in this graph, and they’ve both occurred in the last 25 years.

Even though Victoria has less snow, it doesn’t mean there’s less water falling from the sky. Since 1940, average rain hitting the city has gone up by 53mm per year; about as much as the length of a pinky finger. It’s not a huge surge (only about 6%), but this too is a preview of coming attractions. While climate change is usually associated with hot, dry conditions (such as those that helped precipitate the devastating fires now sweeping Australia), all that extra hot air is going to be evaporating a lot of water that will have to fall somewhere. This is why B.C. is projecting that by 2050, the province will experience up to 12% more rain. Unfortunately, most of this extra rain is going to arrive as violent winter storms, with longer and more frequent droughts forecast for summers.

