Random aspects of late January weather

I seem to have been blogging a lot recently about the weather.  Probably because it has been too unpleasant to go outside and find some birds/insects/flowers to post about.

I will start by noting that yesterday (24 January) had a maximum of 25oC so that ended the Heat Wave.  We also got 3.8mm of rain which was nice.

The overnight low so far today has been 17oC, which suggests some cloud is around.  indeed the radar supports this view (its still too dark - perhaps because of cloud cover ? - to see).
To explain the symbols.  The system is moving SE as indicated by the arrow.  We are at 1 - roughly.  I am surprised the band of stuff at 2 missed us (but see next image).  3 may hold out better prospects for some rain.

At low levels of precipitation the BoM palette probably explains what has gone on.
The band of precipitation at 2 is very doubtful about getting to the ground.  In many cases - including this one - I suspect this is some form of verga.  10 minutes later and the blue in the BoM depiction of system 3 has gone white, so I suspect we might stay dry.  We in fact got 0.4mm out of that.

Later in the day thunderstorms were evident.   Note the gap in trajectory!
It had backup.  We scored 3.4mm in not very long!
On 27 January we are forecast to get 5-20mm in the afternoon evening.  At present (1100 hrs) it seems to have got to about Tumut but is travelling very slowly East (and there is always a chance it will hit the Brindabellas and decide to go somewhere else).
On the evening of the 28th a strong Easterly set in.  Instead of blowing moisture up from the coast to us, it just blew the moisture on the western side of the Brindabellas further West!

A large front was looming in the afternoon of the 30th.  We must get something out of this!



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