November 2016 weather report

Here is a slightly updated version of the report published in the Gazette.  The main change is a decrease of 2mm in monthly rainfall - obviously something got duplicated in my updating.  Sorry about that.
An overall summary of the month would be that following a very wet Winter and and early Spring, and a very cool October, this month was pretty average in everything.

Rain

I regard 50mm of rain in a month as 'reasonable' and we just made it this month.  The rain fell on 8 days spread through the month, although the last week was dry.
Note that the average shown here is for the past 9 years while that in the Gazette notice is for a 32 year period.

Whiskers Creek has run through the month, although getting a bit close to 'trickle' level by the 30th.

Temperatures

Looking at the month in detail there have been a series of warmings (shown by the chain of red boxes) followed by a sharp drop as a front comes through. 
Average maximum temperature was very similar to last year and the long term average.  
 In much the same way that I have commented on frosts during the colder months I intend to cover the number of Heat Wave Days each month over the warmer period.  In essence a Heat Wave is a period if 3 or more consecutive days with a maximum temperature >35o
C and a minimum >10oC.  If you wish to know more its here!'
For November this year we have one heat wave last 4 days.  This is about normal.

The minimum temperature was well less than 2015, but almost exactly on average.

Humidity

When I first compiled a chart of daily readings for Relative Humidity at 3pm I was quite surprised at how many days were below my "reasonable"level of 40%.  So I also downloaded the Bureau of Meteorology data for Canberra Airport.
 It is clear that the two series are very similar.  I then looked at longer term - 4 years of observations - average data which showed that the month was almost spot on the average, but somewhat less than 2015.
I believe the dryness does explain wide the wide brown land is justifying the brown element of the cliche.

Wind.

Looking at the daily maximum gust ...
 ... shows a breezy first half of the month after which the wind was much less evident.

The longer term picture continues to show a pattern of a higher average wind speed than in the past.  (I cannot help but consider I have caused this by clearing the spider webs off the anemometer in April!  Friction is a terrible thing!)

However again I consider the month to be rather average!

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

Satin Bowerbird gets ready for Lanigans Ball.

Image
Having some time to spare today I went to check the bower near "Tom Green's Seat" in the Australian National Botanic Gardens.  The bower was well occupied by what I take to be - based on the green plumage and yellow bill - a 5th or 6th year male Satin Bowerbird.  (With all these images, click on them for a bigger - unfortunately not better focused picture.  The shots were taken hand held on full zoom from about 10m distance into a fairly well shaded location.) He was very much engaged in adding to the construction. Then it seemed that another bird called from the bush above.  This led to a whole lot of activity: the most spectacular (and worst imaged) was a flash of the wings: The bird also did a fair bit of hopping around.  Given that it was still immature I called to mind the greatest traditional Irish song of all time: Diarmuid O'Leary and the Bards performing Lanigan's Ball .  This ditty refers to spending "6 long months at Brooks Academy learning
Read more