Anatomy of a fair sized storm.

In my review of our weather for November I explored the use of rain rate in saying something about the nature of a couple of storms in that month.  In those examples all I had to go on was what I extracted from the weather station output.  There are three reasons for that:

  1. For the first storm we were away from home and didn't have access to some elements of my blogging apparatus;
  2. The second storm was at 2300 and I was trying (unsuccessfully) to sleep through it; and, perhaps most importantly 
  3. I hadn't thought of doing so!

However on 3 December the weather forecast prophesied a thunderstorm in the afternoon and when I checked the 128km radar about 1418 (AEST) this looked like a good tip.
I then noticed some warning were evident for NSW.  One of these was for severe thunderstorms in the Canberra area.
Our place is just about at the end of the red arrow.

About 6 minutes later the 64km radar showed this (our house is at the edge of the white hem SW of the big storm).  It was just starting to rain.
By 1431 the Doppler Radar (128km range) was showing some serious wind coming from the North.
Indeed it came and blew several pot plants around and over when they got wet.

Here is the 64km radar image at 1448 with the body of the storm sitting right over us.  (Interestingly it wasn't supposed to get to Queanbeyan until about 20 minutes later.  But I still reckon  this was pretty spiffy forecasting.)
 By 1524 the storm cell had passed us by and we were just getting steady, and VERY welcome rain.
 I'm now waiting for the rain to pass to see what my weather station has to say about the whole business.  All four of my usual areas of interest - rain, temperature, humidity and wind seemed to have some interesting movements during the period.

Rain

In the following chart I have again multiplied the mm of rainfall x 10 to make them stand out better.
It is interesting that this time the storm started with a downpour and then settled down whereas on 16 November it gradually built up and then quickly stopped.  The peak rainfall rate was 151mm/hour, which is the second highest I have recorded (the highest was 167mm/hour with an accumulation of 14.2mm on 21 November 2013).

Temperature

Essentially it plummeted. As cloud built up the temperature dropped from a high of 31oC to 25oC and then went down a further 8oC as the storm hit.  It has stayed at or near 17oC since then, as a result of cloud cover.

Humidity

Not unexpectedly it rose quickly as the storm approached.  It stayed at 93-95% for the rest of the day.

Wind

The weather station showed an increase in wind as the storm came in but because it is (about 8m) lower mounted than standard and at least partly sheltered it doesn't show the fierceness of the key gusts.  So I haven't included a graph.

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