October weather in the Chemainus Valley brought cooler conditions and less rainfall than usual while the overall mix of sun and cloud was normal.
“The first three weeks of the month were seasonably wet, but the last six days leading up to Halloween saw an anticipated but late arriving dry spell that delivered half the sunshine for the entire month,” pointed out Chemainus weather observer/recorder Chris Carss in his regular monthly report.
“Not surprisingly, October also gave us our first few frosty mornings and our first gale force winds since the end of March, with the latter bringing the first of our customary fall power outages to parts of the Chemainus Valley. With temperatures averaging just over a degree below normal, there was scarcely anything that could be considered an Indian summer after September. A milder than usual day on the seventh was about as good as it got.”
The mean maximum temperature for October was 12.8 degrees Celsius compared to the normal of 14.1 C. The mean minimum also dipped below the normal from 7.4 C to 6.3 C.
The extreme maximum that Carss referred to was 19 C on Oct. 7, with the extreme minimum of 1.0 C being reached on Oct 30.
Days of mostly or partly sunny conditions matched the normal of 12 days with sunshine. There were 19 mostly cloudy days, of which 17 had rainfall - two above the normal of 15 days with rain.
The overall October rainfall total of 114.7 millimetres was a drop from the normal of 133.6 mm.
“The dry spell that started in late October is coming to an end,” Carss noted. “From now on, some periods of rain are expected with somewhat below normal frequency and amounts. Temperatures will likely average near seasonal normals with the return of the wet weather.”