Carwoola Weather report February 2017

This report is a mixture of my observations and some from Anthea's site to cover the period after the fire when power loss and battery failure caused some gaps in my data.  I reckon the picture is OK, as far as it goes, which is rain and temperature.  I'll start with updating the Gazette-format report: as it was submitted a couple of days early and on very partial data the hard copy has been changed more than usual.

Rainfall

What is this stuff called rain?  Neither the January nor February totals are the lowest recorded, but as a 2 month period the only lower value is the first full year for which we have records, 1985.  
Clearly the only positive from this is that February 2017 is not that far behind the miserable value for the same period in 2016.  

Temperatures

Obviously we had a lot of warm maxima but at least there were cool overnight temperatures.
The average maximum temperature at 29.2oC was an insignificant amount above average and below last year.
The average minimum 12.2oC was a bit above both average and last year.  While there was much fuss made in the media about the cold minima in Canberra on the 21st our reading of 3oC was a pussy cat compared to the frosts of -2oC recorded in 1996 and 1998.

Let us finish off with heat waves.  I define a heat wave as being 3 or more days with a maximum above 30oC and a minimum above 10oC.  I count the number of days meeting those criteria.
February 2017 was above average for the number of heat days in February but well below 2016.  I should note that the 17th was not part of a heat wave as there were only 2 consecutive days above 30oC; it was just damn hot and windy.

" Summer"

My definition of Summer doesn't end for another month.  However this article in the SMH may be of interest for the official definition.  I'm particularly glad I wasn't in Moree.  Here is the Canberra version.

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