Weather report October 2015

The official weather report for the last 3 months of the year mentions the words "El Nino".  That certainly looks like a fair call thus far.  The last 2 months have been drier than average (as measured by rainfall) and October had a considerably higher set of minimum temperatures than last month.

Rain

While the fall was better than in September 2015 it was still well below average.  Probably as a result of the above average Winter falls Whiskers Creek has kept running although it is only a trickle by the end of October.  

Looking at a 12 month moving average (thereby eliminating seasonal variation) the final three months shown downward movement, but the trend of the series is still heading up.  But with a value of R2of 0.61 it isn't a particularly strong result.

Temperatures

The bars showing the direction of change from 0:30 to 23:30 are all near the minimum temperatures, showing the desirable state of warm during the day but cooling at night (= easy sleeping).

The next two charts - sorry to those of you who don't like charts - compare the average monthly maxima and minima with the averages of those.
 The maxima were a little over the average.  This was particularly so early in the month, with a couple of days over 30oC, which I thought a trifle rude!  We went over 25oC on 16 days and all maxima were >15oC.
The minima were well above the average.  No frosts were recorded at all (probably trying to lure the tomato planters into an error before Melbourne Cup day).  The minimum was >10oC on 4 occasions and only went below 5oC for the first three nights of the month.

I have also looked at the average temperature for the month.  I won't use up bandwidth on another chart but most of 2015 has been a little cooler than 2014: in October this has changed with the later year 3oC higher.

Humidity

As usual I have shown the 3pm level of Relative Humidity.  In the following chart I have also shown the amount of rain in that calendar day (unlike BoM who measure stuff on a day starting at 9am - which I think reflects their traditional working day).
It is probably a bit surprising that there was no rain in the humid days around 11th to 14th and that there a couple of drops in the last week of the month, when humidity was rather low.  

Unfortunately I only have one other year of humidity records for October (ie 2014) but it is of interest that the 2 averages are pretty similar (and thus the average of averages is also similar).

 Wind

As usual the daily gusts resemble a cross section of the Alps.
 Looking at my average gusts per month - again with only one other year of data - 2015 was a tad less windy.
I have experimented a little with putting a trend line on this graph (to reduce the 'noise' rather than to form a basis for extrapolation etc) and it seemed very sensitive to the type of trendline used.  Using my customary 4th order polynomial gave a 'nice' value of r2 but reckoned the least winy months were March and April which seemed counter-intuitive.  Restricting the trend to a quadratic funcrion gave a less windy period in June/July but only had a poor value of r2.  So I conclude the data isn't up to that level of mucking around.

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