Commentary on Weather for December and other parts of 2012

I will start off with rainfall, based largely on the old technology and covering the whole year.  This is best illustrated by a graphic.
Clearly we had dramatic rain in February and (particularly) March with below average falls in January, April, May, November and December.  We totaled 902mm: the second highest we have logged.  Rain fell on 74 days ( the second lowest we have recorded) with falls of at least 5mm on 43 days: while this is the second highest 4 of the 6 years are in the range 41-43 days.  The biggest single day was 1 March when 87.5mm were recorded.

For December we scored 67.4mm: 4mm more than 2011 but 28.6mm less than the average for the previous 5 years.  It is also notable that 48mm (72%) of December's rain came in sets of storms on 23 and 24 December.

Although Whiskers Creek ran pretty much throughout the year it only went over the drive (which I call flooding) on 5 occasions. In contrast in 2010 it flooded 13 times!

Temperature
The highest temperature recorded was 35C on 19 December.  We got over 30 on 10 days.  The minimum temperature recorded was 0.7C on 6 December, with minima of <10c 12="12" days="days" on="on" p="p">
In terms of daily fluctuation, this chart shows temperatures for each hour averaged over the month.

The next Chart shows the minimum and maximum temperature for each day.
Wind
I will illustrate two aspects of wind below but note that for the month as a whole the greatest windrun was 81.4km on 5 December and the strongest gust was 24.5kph on 24 December (undoubtedly associated with a thunderstorm).

The first chart shows windrun and maximum gust for each day.

The next chart shows the direction of the wind as recorded each hour.  The size of each 'slice' is the number of records from that direction, with North starting at 12 o'clock.  My overall interpretation of this is that chart is that we got a lot of wind from the directions NE to SE and relatively little from the NW.  This doesn't line up too well with 'received wisdom' so will be thought about: at this juncture my thinking is that I don't notice the wind direction after dark when it is more likely to be Easterly,

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