The Simpson Desert comes for a High Country holiday

This area is, to say the least of it. going through a dry spell.  So I thought I would start with a snip from Google Earth of the Simpson Desert.
If you would like to take your own look at that area log in to Google Earth and search for the coordinates -25.5054 136.3310.  (NB the minus sign is crucial as is the gap between the 4 and the 1.  Without the minus you get a spot 800km East of Okinawa, close to Kyosei Seamount ; probably a very interesting area but not too relevant to deserts.)

So why am I banging on about deserts?  Basically because all the grass on our property has browned off and just about every dam in the area around us is dry or close to.  Recent messages to the COG chatline have reported that Lake George and the Big Dam on Lake Road Bungendore are now dry.

The dam closest to our house is about 30cm below full level and dropping by the day.
The next image shows a billabong on Whiskers Creek as it was on 31 December.  The water about 1 metre from the start was about 30cms deep.
A shot from pretty much the same spot on 13 January.
The vegetation is also reacting: the leaves usually come off our willows in late March as the weather gets cold.  They have been falling for 2 weeks plus already,
This is due to the very serious lack of rain for the last 10 months.  In particular we have had very few days with over 5mm of rain.  The situation is summarised in this table.

Month
days >5mm
Total days
mm
jan
4
5
101.7
feb
4
9
54.9
mar
2
3
14.5
apr
1
4
20.5
may
1
7
12.0
jun
6
7
85.8
july
3
9
43.8
aug
3
9
31.8
sep
4
6
104.0
oct
1
6
13.7
nov
5
8
76.9
dec
2
8
26.4
Total
36
81
586

The 4 biggest months (ie one third of months) account for 62% (nearly 2/3rds) of the  total rain.  March October and December were the lowest monthly rainfalls recorded in 7 years. 

In an earlier post about December rainfall I included a chart with an EXCEL projection of the 12 month moving average rainfall.  It is ugly, but I reproduce it here.
So, according to Mr Gates' product, the situation looks likely to stay bad.

What has been surprising is that there has been very little in the media about this situation.  There has been some commentary about heat and lack of feed in outback Queensland but an article in the Canberra Times last Sunday was the first to mutter about water conservation.  Possibly this reflects all the froth that has come out about:
  1. the ACT being drought proofed by the new Cotter Dam (pity it has hardly rained since that was completed); and 
  2. the ACT being drought proofed by the pipeline from the Murrumbidgee (pity one will be able to walk across the 'bidgee soon); and
  3. the ACT being drought proofed by the on-going restrictions on the use of lawn sprinklers etc.
Thus it would be politically very poor to have to say that there is a drought around and point 3 is going to have to be beefed up.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 rec...
Read more

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 ...
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 bird...
Read more