If you thought this week was unreasonably cold, well, you'd be onto something! 

According to Environment Canada meteorologist Matt MacDonald, the city of Kamloops hasn't seen temperatures this cold since 2008. Despite the temperature dropping to -23.9 degrees on Monday night, the River City was still about eight degrees off breaking a record set in 1911. 

"Last night, we dipped down to, at the airport, -23.9 degrees," said MacDonald. "It was -32 degrees with the windchill, the winds were about 20 kilometres out of the east there so it doesn't take much wind to feel closer to -30." 

"Looking at the temperatures historically, this is probably the coldest air we've had since January of 2008. It's definitely exceptional. The thing with Kamloops is the records go back all the way to 1890 so it's hard to break records when you have such a lengthy historical record… Nonetheless, it's really cold. With wind chill values in the -30, we're talking about 10-15 minutes to start to see frostbite." 

In addition to the cold, Kamloops has witnessed some of the fastest winds ever recorded for the city in January. Despite all this, many communities in the province are fairing much worse than the River City. 

"That was actually the strongest wind gusts ever recorded in January. We had a gust at the airport do 75 kilometres per hour on Sunday afternoon with the arrival of that Arctic air."

"We don't have an extreme cold warning out for Kamloops, but if you look at the rest of the province, we have a lot of extreme cold warnings out. Out in the Peace and stuff… A station in the Chilcotin, they were -48.5 this morning. It could be way worse." 

MacDonald mentioned that an "Arctic outbreak" is the main reason for the massive swing in temperature and wind gusts. 

"Basically what you get is a big ridge of high pressure that builds over the Yukon or Northern BC and what that does is it pushes air masses wanting to go away from that centre of high pressure. So it pushes that Arctic air south across the province."

MacDonald went on to say that normal temperatures for this time of year in Kamloops are around zero degrees, something that could happen in the near future.

"It's definitely cold, normals for this time of year are highs of -1 and we're only shooting for -18 today so that's some degrees below normal." 

"We've got today and tomorrow to get through, just a tad milder tomorrow, going for a high of -15. We'll see just a little bit of snow tomorrow, pick up a couple centimetres around town, maybe a little higher up there above the highway."