November Weather report

This is a mixture of information from my own weather station (referred to as an Integrated Sensor Suite - ISS - which has been fixed up by Davis Australia - thanks guys) and from the Bureau of Meteorology website. A comparison between the two series will be covered in the temperature section below.  We will begin however with ...

Rainfall!

We were well above last year's fall, but below the average for the previous 6 years.  

Looking at the year overall we seem to be about normal in terms of the number of days with rainfall, but well down on the number of days with more than 5mm.  Overall I think we are heading for about 600mm of rain in 2013, unless we get a lot more than we are hoping for in December.

Temperature

While my weather station was in in ISS-hospital I took data for the Isabella Plains BoM site as an indicator.  I have compared the two series since getting the ISS back.
The correlation coefficient for maxima was/is 098 (very strong) while for minima is "only" 0.87 (still significant, but not so good).  The key date appears to be the 5th, where BoM recorded a minimum of 11o while the ISS recorded 4.9o.  

(I suspect the problem here is the difference in timing as the BoM "day" runs from 9am to 9am while the ISS does calendar days.  This would require a warm morning followed by a cool evening, and I can't find the data to demonstrate this.  I will note that from the lines in the chart above the BoM observation looks more like an outlier than does the ISS data.)

Overall I believe that combining the two series gives a fair picture of what temperatures have done over the past month.
We had two ground frosts (minimum between 0 and +2o but no minima below 0o.  Three maxima exceeded 30o while a further 9 were between 25o and 30o.

Wind

The following chart shows the BoM maximum gust for the whole month and the ISS maximum gust since it has been back with us.  
Clearly the ISS records lower wind speed than the BoM.  This is not surprising as the ISS is sited far lower than a meteorological standard anemometer.  The correlation between the two series is "reasonable" at 0.51, but not even close enough to good enough to contemplate combining them!

Humidity

I have in the past used 5pm Relative Humidity as my ISS indicator.  In this case the BoM offer 3pm and 9am as their standards so I have used both of those below (with the 3pm one first).

Eyeballing the graphs suggests they travel pretty well together.  This is supported by both correlation coefficients being a very healthy 0.876 (plus small change).

I thought it might be interesting to compare the two BoM series.  
The basic story is  unsurprising with 0900 usually >1500 and both series having a very high value on the day of consistent rain,  However there are a number of days inwhich the day to day changes move in different directions so the series do not correlate strongly.

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

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the birds: The view from the top of
Read more