March 2018 Weather Report

In summary, reasonably mild and extremely dry.  Here is the table from the Gazette: as I compiled that on April 1 it hasn't changed since the Gazette was published.

Rainfall

As some of you may have forgotten what rain is, I'll start by quoting from Wikipedia:
"Rain is liquid water in the form of droplets that have condensed from atmospheric water vapor and then becomes heavy enough to fall under gravity. 
We managed a whole 5.8mm which is the lowest March rainfall since I started recording 11 years ago.  Going back to 1985, when community recording started, there are 3 lower records for March.  Here is my standard chart:
Taking the year to date we have achieved 95.4mm, which is 46.6% of the average to the end of March.  

There are various ways in which that could be extrapolated to give an estimate of the fall at the end of the year.  I am currently using an approach based on the average (since 1985) proportion of annual falls by a given date.  This shows an expected annual fall of 349mm.  (Using average (since 2007) fall to the end of March gives a slightly more optimistic 412mm.)  The progress of the estimated annual fall over the year is shown below.
The "great leaps upward" on 10 and 14 January and 25 February clearly show that we have only had 3 significant rainy days this year.

Temperatures

My average daily maximum was 25.04c (about 0.1c below the average since 1993 and 0.2c above the average since 2010).  Average daily minimum was 10.08c. This is 1.2c above the average since 1994 but 0.3c below the average since 2010.  The mean average temperature for March was 16.9c, right on the 10 year average.   

The following chart shows the daily temperature extremes across the month.

Maximum temperatures

Here is a summary of recent average monthly maximum temperatures.
Looking back into history of yearly March temperatures the average daily maximum fits well into the - quite variable - experience since 2010. 
It seems that the change of site in 2010 might have gone to a somewhat less hot location but a subsequent change in 2016 has had no impact..

There were no heat waves in March.  There were 4 days over 30oC but they were all single days.  (Unlike February, including days of 29oC in consideration did not get to the 3 consecutive days needed to count as a wave.) 

Minimum Temperatures

Following the same approach as above shows a minimum above average, but much less so than last year.
Fitting a 4th order polynomial trend to the time series graph gives a fair value of R2 suggesting that the minimum temperature is warming up.
March is an interesting month in that some years have a heat wave and the first frosts can occur.  This year we had one light frost (minimum between +2oC and 0oC, but no hard frost (below 0oC).  This is about normal (aka average)!

Average Temperature

The month was very close to average and a little down on last year.
 Looking at the period since 2010 March average temperature has varied within a 2o band.  There is no obvious trend.

Humidity

Some very low readings for both 9am and the traditional 3pm. This is not surprising given the lack of rain.
In comparison with other years (back to 2013) the average 3pm rH was a little lower than average, but well below the value for the very moist 2017.

Wind

The average gust in the month was well above average for March.
As all recent months have been well above average I wonder whether this is because spiders have stopped nesting on the anemometer rather than anything to do with the breeziness!  I regard the wind data as very dubious.

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