The Okanagan bracing for the potential of an extremely dry summer season

While still fairly green, the Okanogan is dry, very dry, with the valleys drought rating now at two out of five. We're in drought level 2 right now because we had a drought last year. We were in drought for most of the summer, so we can see how dry the actual valley is up here. The Okanogan Basin water board saying those lingering effects combined with a lower winter snowpack, a low precipitation and warmer than normal temperatures causing an early fresh set is prompting a warning to prepare for drought conditions potentially getting worse over the coming months. Level 2 means that water providers, so utilities and water users, agricultural users, local residents, everybody in the valley should consider. Conserving water where appropriate and where possible. Last year, the province declared level 2 drought conditions in the Okanogan in June. This year it's a month earlier, with some pretty major indicators of how dry it already is for this time of year. An example of how dry it is and how quickly the snow has melted and how little there was is actually the Brenda Mines site. Where we have snow measurement data, we have snow measurement data. They're going back 28 years and this year it was snow free, the earliest on that record. So it was snow free about two weeks ago. BC snow pack, the lowest it's ever been at this time of year according to the BC River Forecast Center. We look at the Okanogan, it was sitting at 60% to normal, which is extremely low. Last year it was at 144% to normal. So more than double the amount of snow as we came into this, this time. So yeah, certainly quite a different story. Many river and Creek levels, including Mission Creek Running shallower from this time in 2023, which ended up being one of the driest years on record. I'm I'm certainly concerned about that, particularly those areas where we're starting to dwindle, the snow or we have dwindled the snow that we could really see more rapid shifts towards. Lower flows and declining flows in the in the coming weeks here and I think that's certainly as we get more into that drought side of things, that's the concern that we're setting ourselves up for quite a lot of challenges on the drought side with the weather outlook not appearing to be all that helpful. What looks like this drier and warmer than normal trend is going to continue as the overall trend throughout meteorological summer, so June through August. So unfortunately it's not the best news for the fire danger rating or the drought situation, making those early water conservation efforts critical to help us get through what is so far shaping up to be another very dry summer. Claudia, Venomer Global News, Kelowna.