May 2015 Weather

In summary, Autumn going on Winter, with a preview of El Nino!  In other words cold and pretty dry.

Rain

Only one day with more than 5 mm of rain, giving a pretty miserable total of 16.2mm. This was a little below last year and the 9 year average.
 As suggested by the average, May is normally a rather dry month.  Looking at the results for the past 9 years we have only had decent rainfall (which I define as >50mm) in 1 year and it is mainly less than 20mm.

Temperatures

The month felt quite cold, largely as a result of a good number of frosts, making it seem colder than recent months.  The maximum temperature was quite consistently around 15C , but the minimum was rather more cyclic.
 Looking at the red boxes (showing the 2330 temperature higher than the 0030 temperature) and blue boxes (vice versa) shows that in the second half of the month there are periods with groups of similar change.  This is normally a more random indicator.

In terms of frosts, there were 18 days with a minimum below 2C
of which 12 were below 0C ie an air frost.

Although my averages are at best only three observations (since 2013) looking at the monthly average maximum shows that to be a little lower than average for May ....
 ... while the average minimum for the month is a very small amount higher than the average.
The average temperature (ie a simple average of every 30 minute reading through the month) was  8C slightly lower than the equivalent value for 2014..

Humidity

As usual the humidity level at 1500hrs varies considerably across the month.
The average 1500 hrs humidity for May 2015 was very close to the average value for the past 3 years.

Wind

If humidity is usually "a bit variable" the wind readings are all over the place (but, again, that is as usual)!!  As per my standard this chart shows the maximum gust each day.
I can't come up with a few words which summarise that graph better than just presenting the image.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are our routes: That map comes from Google Maps (G
Read more

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I recall years ago driving al
Read more

Satin Bowerbird gets ready for Lanigans Ball.

Image
Having some time to spare today I went to check the bower near "Tom Green's Seat" in the Australian National Botanic Gardens.  The bower was well occupied by what I take to be - based on the green plumage and yellow bill - a 5th or 6th year male Satin Bowerbird.  (With all these images, click on them for a bigger - unfortunately not better focused picture.  The shots were taken hand held on full zoom from about 10m distance into a fairly well shaded location.) He was very much engaged in adding to the construction. Then it seemed that another bird called from the bush above.  This led to a whole lot of activity: the most spectacular (and worst imaged) was a flash of the wings: The bird also did a fair bit of hopping around.  Given that it was still immature I called to mind the greatest traditional Irish song of all time: Diarmuid O'Leary and the Bards performing Lanigan's Ball .  This ditty refers to spending "6 long months at Brooks Academy learning
Read more