The Heat goes on!

We shall see where the weather takes this post, but I thought the sunrise (at about 0547 on 12 January) was impressive enough for an image!

Shortly after this I went out for a run, on the basis that whatever the weather threw at us, with 13C and 40%RH, it was unlikely to be better for waddling later in the day than it was then.  As I headed down to the Creek it was nicely cool but as I toddled along there were odd small patches of warm air.  I know what it means when you find a patch of warm water in a swimming pool, but couldn't work out a rationale for this phenomenon.  Flatulent kangaroos?

The weather for the rest of the day is well described by the meteorological term "A Funny Old Day".  The ravings of the media suggested this could be as risky as the previous Tuesday.  That didn't happen by a long shot and to their credit the RFS had a lower level of risk.

Here is a chart of the temperature each hour, comparing Saturday with Tuesday:

After the traditional start with temperature falling to about 7am the cloud shown in the first image burnt off and the temperature climbed quite quickly.  (An interesting linguistic point: does anyone use terms such as "the mercury soared....." anymore?).  After hitting 38C at about 1pm the cloud came back and the temperature slowly dropped.

The wind was also a lot less than the Tuesday.  The sum of hourly gusts for Tuesday was 230km while for Saturday it was only 89.

The great drop in wind speed later in the day was a tad excessive: it meant the house didn't really cool down with no through breeze.

Readers should note that these readings are a good bit lower than those recorded by BoM.  I suspect this is because my anemometer is about 1.5m above the ground rather than 10m and the position is relatively sheltered.  Since the use of the reading is compare my site over time and not provide data for comparison across sites I think it is fit for purpose.

On 13 January we had to go into Canberra around 1000 to make childish noises (ooh, aah etc) at, and generally check up on the lovely Arabella and when we began to descend the Queanbeyan escarpment there was a dense smoke haze.  The next image was taken on the way home, when the wind had risen somewhat: on the way in, the ridge marked Red Hill etc was barely visible.  The Brindabellas are normally clearly visible from here.

I have no idea which specific fires (the ones near Yass and Cooma would be the usual suspects) the smoke was coming from but found this blog with some brilliantly evocative images of the ACT RFS at work.

The heat finally broke on the 13th with a very cloudy day, ending up with about 5 hours of steady, gentle rain, totalling 6.6mm.