Light snow for Kamloops, Okanagan but heavy snow forecast for crucial Highway 3

The only road link to the Lower Mainland from the southern Interior, Highway 3, is under a snowfall alert starting tomorrow morning.

A storm system moving into the Lower Mainland Friday morning, Dec. 10, will dump 40 to 50 millimetres of rain before hitting the mountains with as much as 25 centimetres of snow forecast for Highway 3 through to Saturday.

It’s a system that will have minimal impact on the valley bottoms in the Okanagan and Kamloops.

The Environment Canada forecast for the Okanagan calls for a 30% chance of snow today and 60% tomorrow but AccuWeather predicts only about one cm of snow during that time.

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Temperatures in the Okanagan will hover around the freezing level through the weekend with highs peaking at 3 Celsius on Saturday. Sunshine is forecast for Sunday.

Overnight lows will dip to -6 C tonight but only to -1 C on the weekend.

The AccuWeather forecast for Kamloops predicts rain tomorrow and one cm of snow on Saturday.

The low in Kamloops is expected to be -8 C overnight tonight with a high for the week on Saturday at 4 C.

While it’s harder to predict beyond the weekend, the AccuWeather forecast for Kamloops calls for snow starting late Sunday evening with accumulations of up to 13 cm through Monday.

The forecast for Kelowna calls for sleet, freezing rain and snow late Sunday evening. The AccuWeather forecast doesn’t show much in the way of precipitation for Vernon or Penticton that night.


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Rob Munro

Rob Munro has a long history in journalism after starting an underground newspaper in Whitehorse called the Yukon Howl in 1980. He spent five years at the 100 Mile Free Press, starting in the darkroom, moving on to sports and news reporting before becoming the advertising manager. He came to Kelowna in 1989 as a reporter for the Kelowna Daily Courier, and spent the 1990s mostly covering city hall. For most of the past 20 years he worked full time for the union representing newspaper workers throughout B.C. He’s returned to his true love of being a reporter with a special focus on civic politics

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