Weather report May 2017

At an early stage in the month a comment was made to the effect that May was an uninteresting month as it wasn't hot, but not really cold, and there was little rain.  Those attributes were evident this May, but it is still interesting to see see how the month sits within the year and how this May compares with earlier Mays.

For most measures the month was indeed close to average (possibly the number of average readings was above average?).  The exception was minimum temperature which was for the 4th month this year well above average.

Rainfall

The month ended with a total fall of 35.4mm: a little below last year and the 33 year average, but above the average for the 10 years we have lived here.
It is noteworthy that 29.6mm of this fell on the 19th or 20th of May.  The rest of the month was very dry.  However the water seems to have got into the soil and Whiskers Creek has run through the month.

The year-to-date fall continues to catch up from the deficit of the very dry January and February: we're now at 64% of the average.  However a pro-rata estimate of the annual total is still only 457mm, which would be the lowest recorded in the 10 year period and the second lowest for the 33 year period.  As the BoM forecasters are muttering about a dry period coming up we could set a record!

Temperatures

A mild start to the month was followed by dropping temperatures towards the end.
 Looking at the long term averages May continued the year's pattern of maxima close to or below average  ....
 .. with minimum temperatures well above average.
The big-ticket item in Winter is the number of frosts.  As with previous months the two measures are temperatures below +2oC  (a ground frost) and temperatures below 0oC  (an air frost).  The first two charts below show the number of days meeting those criteria in 2017 and the 24 year average.

Clearly the number of frosts is below average for both measures.  That is emphasised by looking at the values for 2017 as a % of the average.  Clearly we have been very deficient in deficiency of warmth.

Humidity

As always I take the relative humidity reading for 3pm as my indicator.  As usual the graph looks like a cross section of the Himalayas, but note that no day was below 40% or above 90%.   A pretty bland month.
The comparison with longer term average  - in this case 5 years - shows, somewhat surprisingly in view of there only being one major rain event,  that the month was slightly above average for humidity.  That justifies my subjective view of it being a rather drab month: no rain but cloudy.

Wind

As usual I am unsure about the quality (somewhere on the continuum from poor to useless) of the wind data due to poor location of my weather station.  However the average gust for the month was quite low.

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