Weather Report February

Here is the Gazette-format summary.
 I wondered what the fire danger was like after the weekend rain (and cool weather on 26th and 27th.  The answer was very green everywhere!
I then wondered how frequently the entire State was Low/Moderate fire danger in February, but given the RFS can't put the date in a graphic, I doubt if they could answer that question!

Rain

I have done an ad-hoc report on the rainy weekend.  The conclusions from that are that it was a very wet period in an otherwise dry month, but there didn't seem to any trend in the variability of rainfall in Februarys.

This month we ended with 53.4mm of rain which was a) better than last year but b) still a long way below average.
Applying a simple prorata extrapolation to the rainfall to date gives a total of 433mm expected for the year.  However using extrapolation of a trendline (dodgy with only 2 observations) gives a much more reasonable, but still low, expectation of ~615mm.
It is very interesting that the two trend lines in that graph are almost parallel with the major difference in the equations being the 2.4mm difference in the origin.

Temperatures

At various points it looked as though this month was going to be a scorcher but overall the temperatures were not too bad,  A couple of relatively cool changes later in the month are clearly shown by dips in the Maximum line (and to a lesser extent in the Minimum line).
The average temperature for the month was lower than last year and almost exactly on the average of averages.  Again supporting the statement that temperatures were not too bad.

Maximum Temperatures

The average maximum temperature for the month was, as with January, below last year and almost on the average .
 Looking at the period since 2010 there is a fair bit of fluctuation in the average maximum temperatures for February.
 My final look at high temperatures is the number of heat wave days.  I define a heat wave as a period of 3 or more consecutive days with maximum temperatures above 30oC and minimum temperatures above 10oC.  This year we had only one heat wave, lasting 7 days.
 There were another 5 days over 30oC but in isolated 1 or 2 day bursts.  It is interesting that if the criterion was dropped to 'over 29oC' we would still have only had one heat wave - but it would have lasted for 16 days!

Minimum Temperatures

The average minimum temperature for February this year was considerably lower than for  January this year and a little lower than February last year.  However it continues the experience of the last 14 months of being above the long term average.
 Again looking at the period since 2010 the pattern is a little unusual as the first 2 years are oddly high compared to the fairly constant averages between ~11.5oC and 12.5oC.

Humidity

The standard graphic shows that average humidity at 1500Hrs for the month was a  fair amount below average.  
Looking at daily readings, and taking 40% as a reasonable average, 15 of 28 days were below that value.  The lowest value - on 15 February - was 14% (the third lowest recorded since November 2013) and the 16% recorded - on the 18th - was the 4th lowest.

I have also included readings for 0900Hrs in the chart below as I noticed as the month unfolded that some of those values were very low.

The values for 10 February are particularly interesting showing a very dry morning and a very damp - raining - afternoon.

The next chart is possibly so complicated as to become meaningless, but I found it interesting as it compares daily values for February 2018 with the average values for that day over Februarys since 2013.
I have boxed the very dry 1500 reading early in the month while the ellipses mark very dry afternoon readings.

Wind

As I usually confess my WS is poorly placed to record wind so I only do a minimalist analysis of that attribute of the weather.  The first chart shows that it was a pretty drafty month in comparison to other Februarys.
The next chart shows the maximum gust recorded each day.  My recollection is that the day with the highest gusts -14th was one of several during the month where storm cells appeared but the rain split around us! The second peak on the 24th was the lead-up to the very rainy period.

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