Storm hitting Atlantic Canada 'very similar' to what struck B.C.: meteorologist

Last week, a devastating storm swept across B.C. and caused massive amounts of flooding and evacuations — now, Atlantic Canada is facing a storm caused by the same type of atmospheric conditions.

“It's a very similar storm,” Bob Robichaud, a senior Environment Canada meteorologist based in Nova Scotia, told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview.

“It's the same type of atmospheric setup that would generate this type of rainfall.”

He explained that this type of extreme rainfall event, like the one in B.C., occurs when a “very concentrated plume of moisture in the atmosphere that streams up from the tropics” becomes part of a storm.

“If there's a storm and you get this stream of moisture coming up from the south, [it’ll be] very, very comparable to what they had on the West Coast there last week. And in fact, in some areas of Atlantic Canada, we're potentially looking at even more precipitation than what fell in B.C. last week.”