Weather average, going on ordinary

In colloquial Australian the word "average" implies that something is far from the mean of expected (or at least hoped_for) values.  It means something that is inherently undesirable.  When 'your' football team is beaten by a team wearing black and white (surprisingly this phenomenon crosses code boundaries as well as State borders) it would be described as a "pretty average result".

In the same way 'ordinary' implies something out of the usual in a negative direction.  When some thug (I don't have to describe their guernsey, do I) king-hits your best player that would be a "fairly ordinary bit of play".

The use of the terms in this way is not restricted to sport.  Tuesday 24 June was an excellent specimen of the circumstances in which they might be applied to the weather.

The minimum temperature for the day was 1.5C early in the morning.  About 3pm I emailed a friend to say the temperature hadn't got about 4C.  (It had staggered up to about 6.5C by 9pm.)

It rained more or less all day, and I got fed up with using electricity to pump water up the hill, just to have it overflow the main tank and run back down again.  This led the catch-tank to overflow very soon after.
A small drain was then dug to lead the water towards a lawn, rather than simply filling up the pit in which the tank stands.   We totaled 14.4mm for the day.(following 8.8mm the previous day).

To add to the misery of the day cloud-base was around 900m as it was well down the face of the Taliesin Hills behind our house.

Getting the quadrella of unpleasantness into line it was also very windy.  Here is a Doppler radar image from 1439.
The most interesting element of this is the patch of red of the edge of the dark blue.  The software which generates these images cycles colours so if the windspeed is >100kmh (the top of the dark blue range it goes to the far end of the scale and uses dark red for speeds between 100 and 110.  (Memo to self: check the next cyclone to see if that captures a Doppler image with over 200kph.)

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