BY MATTHEW ROBINSON, VANCOUVER SUN

VANCOUVER — Sunshine and record-breaking highs in Vancouver on Sunday punctuated the end of heavy rain that washed through the South Coast Friday and Saturday.

At Vancouver International Airport, the temperature hit 14 C Sunday, beating the previous high for Jan. 25 — set in 1992 — by 2.2 degrees. The temperature also came within 1.3 degrees of the all-time January high, set in 1981.

The weekend rains were part of a watery meteorological phenomenon sometimes called a Pineapple Express — a term thought up by U.S. National Weather Service forecasters years ago for the odd appearances of unbroken channels of wet, stormy weather that would stretch from Hawaii to the northern west coast of North America.

On arrival Friday, the express began to unload some of the more than 100 millimetres of rain it would deliver to some cities in the region over the course of two days.

West Vancouver saw 77 mm of rain on Friday alone — just a little more than what fell in Vancouver, Pitt Meadows and Coquitlam, and about 15 mm more than Howe Sound.

But the express didn’t carry nearly enough moisture to drown the region’s record January rainfalls. Among those records are the more than 171 mm that fell in Burnaby on Jan. 18, 1968, and the 160 mm that dumped on North Vancouver on Jan. 18, 2005.

So although that rain seemed like an awful lot, once it’s put into perspective, it would have taken a pair of Pineapple Expresses to refill the record book.

Unfortunately for skiers, the warm weather accompanying the express meant all that moisture failed to fall as snow on local mountains, which had zero centimetres of new snow between Friday and Sunday.