Weather April 2016

Very dry is the description that matters.  Our dams are the lowest I have seen, and Whiskers Creek has not run at all during the month..

Rain

We managed a miserable 4.6mm for the month with noticeable falls on 2 days (one of which was the 30th)!  This was the lowest April of the 10 years I have been recording here, and only 1.6mm above the lowest month ever (May 2009).
The pathetic nature of the precipitation is emphasised by a 12 month moving average (which removes the impact of seasonal factors.
This shows the adjusted rainfall has dropped consistently since November 2015.

Fortunately May looks somewhat better: indeed as I type, at 6am on the 1st of May we have already got 3.2mm for the month!

Temperatures

A temperate month with few hot days or cold nights.  The overall pattern was a series of sharp drops in maxima, followed by a slow warming period.  The height of each recovery was a little lower than the one before.
For the benefit of new readers the green lines link the minimum and maximum temperatures for each day while the boxes indicate the temperatures at 0030 and 2330 each day (red indicates 2330 is warmer than 0030 and blue that 0030 is the warmer).

The first frost (temperature at 2oC or less) was 1.8oC on 11 April (about average date).  Another two frosts occurred towards the end of the month. 

In terms of averages both average minimum and maximum were above the average of previous years.  The increase is higher for the maximum.

Humidity

In a word "low"!

It has been suggested that an rH of 40% is 'reasonable': in April 2016 11 days were below that level at 3pm.  Of the four previous Aprils for which I have records there has only been one previous reading that low.

Looking at the longer term average shows this month to be well below average and significantly below last April.  (The year on year comparison is not surprising as rainfall in April 2016 was the least recorded for April while 2015 was the most.)


Wind

The daily chart for the month shows a couple of moderately windy spells.
While the longer term chart of averages (taken across every 30 minute reading rather than the daily maximum gust) shows the continued low level of wind/

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