For people who have been in the Okanagan for a long time, a dry summer isn’t weird but this dry spell is out of the ordinary.

Kelowna hasn’t seen a measurable drop of rain in more than 45 days, and the same goes for most of the Okanagan, including the Bald Range fire area. Kamloops has been better off, but still far below normal for this time of year.

Kamloops had 14.2 millimetres of precipitation in June, 6.8 mm in July and August has only seen a trace amount of rain too small to measure. In 2025, Kamloops had 40.3 mm of rain in June, 24.4 mm in July and 16.1 mm in August.

So far this year Kelowna had 21.3 mm of rain. In July it rained once and the city got 1.3 mm. In August, no rain so far at all. Last year, Kelowna had 15.7 mm in June, 35.3 mm in July and 12.6 in August.

Kamloops is at roughly 20 per cent of normal rainfall for the summer and Kelowna is at just 3.5 per cent.

Environment Canada meteorologist Brian Proctor said it could be one of the driest summer’s on record.

He said there have been some Julys in the past when there was no precipitation at all in Kamloops, Kelowna, Penticton and Vernon.

“It’s not atypical for us in the summer to see one of these dry months but to see the duration of this dryness is really what’s the most concerning right now,” Proctor told iNFOnews.ca.

There’s some stormy weather in the forecast for this coming weekend, but Proctor said it likely isn’t the relief the region is hoping for.

“Some dry lightning in some of the valley bottoms and ridge lines. I wouldn’t put a whole lot of stock in getting a lot of precipitation with it,” he said.

“Not a good news story.”

BC Wildfire Service fire behaviour analyst Eric Kopetski said the lack of rain has made fire fuels drier than ever in the area of the Bald Range wildfire in the South Okanagan.

“We’ve got about 40 days without precipitation on this fire. This has led our fuels to reach near record levels of dryness,” he said in a statement, Aug. 16.

The silver lining is the thick smoke has kept temperatures lower than usual. Proctor said August so far has been slightly above seasonal averages temperature-wise with daytime highs in the low 30s.

“We’ve had quite a bit of smoke for the month of August plugging those valley bottoms so it’s probably moving us down towards more expected values and if it wasn’t for the smoke we’d probably still be very warm,” he said.