Happiness is wetness

Carwoola has had a very dry start to the year.  So it was very pleasing to score 9.8mm of rain on the 2nd of March.  This was enough to get the Creek running.
 From looking out over the Plain on the 3 rd
 I had hopes that we get a good follow-up.  But only amounted to 2mm.

The BoM forecast for the weekend of 4-5 March has been up and down over the last few days and had ended up in the low end of their estimates.  Early on the 4th I consulted the radar ...
... (and, using the most reliable forecasting technique, looked out the window) which led me to conclude we could get a fair drop.  So it was, throughout our dog walk.  On returning home, with about 6mm in the gauge the radar looked like this - we're at the red x and the system seemed to be heading NNW.
By 10 am we'd got to 9.8mm (again) with a month to date of 21.9mm.  So where does this fit into past records?  Here is a plot of the March records for Carwoola (at various locations in the general area) since 1985.
The mean value for 1985 to 2016 is 50.66mm.  Clearly 1989 and 2012 are outliers and excluding them gives a slightly more normal mean of 38.7mm.  The median value (half years above and half years below) is 42.4mm, so a fair expectation is about 40mm in a normal March.

Another way of thinking about this is to look at the number of years in which the rainfall was in a few classes.  I hope this chart is comprehensible: it show that the commonest class is 10 - 39.9mm  with 40 - 59.9mm not far behind.  Again about 40mm would be a fair expectation.
The rain on 2nd of March didn't seem to sink in very much, but that of the 4th may have started to get down to where some shallow roots at least can get hold of it.  Hopefully it will also have started wash the smell of smoke and charcoal out of the air!


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