Unpleasant weather

The weather forecast for the weekend  6-7 January was unpleasant indeed.  And the weather delivered thereon!  I spent most of the time cowering in the air-conditioned indoors.

The reason for the unpleasantness was the hot air being delivered from the centre.  This is demonstrated nicely by a clip from Meteye in the morning of the 7th showing wind coming from the NW at 25 -30 kph.
Another clip, the doppler Wind view from the Captains Flat radar, shows that stronger winds are yet to arrive.
By late afternoon matters were looking a little stormy out the window and on the Weatherzone presentation of the radar data.  We are at the red X and the system was moving as shown by the arrow.
It duly arrived.
I will return to this below but will conclude the clips with this one of the Weatherzone radar for Victoria, from about 2000 hrs showing a very intense line of storms.  (It was heading East rather than South East so went past us to the North.)
The first chart shows the hourly maximum and minimum temperatures for the two days (and a little bit of the 8th.
 This shows that we got pleasant minima on both days (but a nastily high one of 21 oC on the 8th).  As the 2 full days showed different profiles - particularly for the minimum temperatures I plotted a comparative chart.
The plummet in hourly minimum between 4pm and 5pm - 10oC - as a storm front passed through is, and was, most impressive.   While it kicked up a whisker thereafter its heart wasn't in it and the worst of the heat had gone.

I also looked at humidity.  The first chart is the equivalent of the preceding one.
 I noticed that the shape of the lines was almost a mirror image of the temperature chart.  looking at the correlation between the series confirmed this with a value of the correlation coefficient of -0.98 for the 6th and -0.94 for the 7th,/sup>.  That shows up rather interestingly if the rH is subtracted from 100!

We scored 1.2mm of rain in the squall then and a further 0.4mm before 5am on the 8th.  While not a drenching it laid the dust.  (Pro-rata expansion of the 1.6mm total gives an expected annual total of 52.2mm!)

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