By: KSBY Meteorologist Steve Adamson

The Winter Olympics are starting later this week and there’s one venue in Vancouver that isn’t happy with the way the weather has been behaving so far this winter. Cypress Mountain which will be hosting the snowboarding and freestyle skiing events, has endured unseasonably mild conditions much of the winter to date. In fact, the city of Vancouver itself has been basking in record warm temperatures.

While the resort area of Whistler ( where other skiing events will be held ) has managed to fare better in terms of snowfall, Cypress Mountain located about a half hour’s drive from downtown Vancouver, has resigned itself to having to truck snow in. The snow is being trucked in from Allison Pass, which is about a two hour drive from Cypress.

The same weather pattern that has brought the Central Coast of California some rather generous rainfall so far this winter is also responsible for the unusually mild conditions in the southern parts of British Columbia. ( Where Vancouver is located ) What would normally fall as snow in the Vancouver area, has been falling as rain, especially in the lower elevations and the lower portions of the mountains. It’s a result of the El Nino pattern. Temperatures have been just too mild in that area for snow as a general rule.

While Olympic organizers would love nothing more than a change in the weather to help bring snow naturally back to the area, the events will go on at Cypress with workers continuing to truck snow in as needed throughout the games as necessary. That will probably be needed too, because the weather pattern into the rest of February suggests a continuation of unseasonably mild temperatures for the most part, meaning what precipitation falls in the Vancouver area will apt to be more rain than snow.

While this might be considered unusual, it’s not unprecedented for The Winter Olympics to deal with lack of snowfall. In 1964, mild temperatures kept game organizers from putting down ice for the luge and bobsled runs, so the Austrian army had to carve out 20,000 blocks of ice from the mountainside  and transport it to the runs. They also brought in 1.4 million cubic feet of snow to the alpine ski slopes.