How the Nation is badly served by the GreenLeft media, Green biased water bureaucrats and useless knee-jerk green politicians. Bleating on about rainfall in normally dry summer months – beating up normal events like fish kills – failing to drive home that major problems are the mad environmental flows politicians have agreed to – invoking Flannery by using language like “unless it rains” which to the ignorant implies it might not rain again. Seemingly failing to realize that news beating up MDB heat is quoting the BoM adjusted warmer ACORN temperature data where the past is cooled.
Examples from last 3 months – “rainfall continues to contract” – “Hot, dry year” – “outlook is grim unless it rains”. Trend for southern wet season is similar. Black line is 5 yr av.
And if you check your series of 8 annual Australian drought maps it is obvious that only 2018 has large areas of drought in the MDB.
Of the other 7 years 2013 was the worst. So all the wrist slashing is over a one year drought.
www.warwickhughes.com/agri16/Qld7or8yrdrought.html
“beating up normal events like fish kills”
Beat up is right, the number of times they repeated “up to a million fish” with few seconds of amateur video of one river location showing a few hundred fish, it became irritating.
All the media turned up expecting to get dramatic video of the cleanup but got nothing because supposedly the million fish had sunk or been taken by birds.
Unlike the temperature data underpinning ACORN 1 and 2 rainfall data has not been subjected to the same level of torture by "black box" – as yet! So the area adjusted rainfall data is still of relevance and when you look at annual rainfall trends since 1900, for example when you look at the MDB and Australia as a whole both show an increasing trand. By this measure only Southwestern Western Australia shows a significant declining annual rainfall trend while Southeastern Australia (which in BOM terms esentially includes only Victoria and Southern NSW) shows very small decline, i.e. about a "bee's diaphram".
Beachgirl, if you want maps of Queensland drought declarations here is the site www.longpaddock.qld.gov.au/drought/archive/ . The longpaddock site has maps of Australian rainfall going back to 1890 look at the line in blue. Media and most others forget that the worst drought was the Federation drought which started around 1900 but earlier in some parts of Australia and did not finish everywhere until 1919. Where I live in Qld the driest year was 1902 with about 1/4 of normal yearly rainfall but 1900, 1911 and 1915 were also bad years. In the period 1900 to 1919 every year except 1906 and 1914 had below average rainfall.
From my read of this blog over years I think wazz goes by the BoM drought maps and not various State Govt measures which beat up the so called drought areas.
OT, but on the theme of how little we can rely on the BOM for even short-term forecasting, let alone long-term projections.
Living in Brisbane, I evidently have an interest in TC Oma. While it’s quite slow moving, it’s path has been more like an oldie with a walker moving towards the morning tea table, rather than a drunk trying desperately to make his way through a doorway.
Consequently, I’ve been a little befuddled (yes, “befuddled” – great verb) by the reporting on what/where/when we might expect dear Oma to smite us down with her almighty, super climatically-enhanced vengeance.
At 8am, she’s going to hit us Saturday AM with +120mm downpours; by 10am she may slide south and bring strong winds, large surf and 60mm rain; at 12pm she’s going to impact the Capricornia coast, with some rain in the Brisbane and south-east districts;….you get the idea.
How, I wondered, is there so much uncertainty in the forecasting, given the relatively stately, but linear progression of the system to date?
So, I did the logical thing and went to the BOM’s forecast track map. At this point, please click on the link below to view the track, then read the balance of this post:
i64.tinypic.com/2095yq8.jpg
Hmm…you might have noticed that BOM shows OMA wandering largely south-west consistently for days on end, then on Saturday afternoon she suddenly, violently changes course to the north-west, as if Roger Federer had smashed her with a double-handed backhand.
This, dear believer, is supposedly the BOM’s best guess, after multiple runs of multiple models of Oma’s most likely track.
I must admit that I feel a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, I’m quite disappointed that I spent 2 hours on the roof and in the yard cleaning gutters, drains, etc in anticipation of rainaggedon. On the other, I’m incredibly relieved that South-east Queensland seems to have acquired a weather forcefield which repels cyclones, squalls (and presumably asylum-seekers from Auckland) just before they are likely to cause us trouble.
So, all I can say is – thank the heavens for the BOM! Without the hundreds of millions they’ve spent on climate disaster modelling and planning, that money would have been put towards weather observing and forecasting assets.
And, had such rational heads prevailed, none of us would have been able to laugh out loud at the brand new, Australia-only phenomenon of the V-shaped cyclone.
Last night BoM had the Cyclone Oma track turning west and then NNW or northerly. Today it is turning first east then north.
February is turning out much cooler than January too – a fact which is of course prominent in media. No authority says why.
Sunday and Cyclone Oma looks to have mostly dissipated into a huge band of cloud with the odd rainband mostly over the ocean – NZ is getting some rain off the Oma tail.
>: “No authority says why”
The Defenders of the Realm will be here shortly to perform the rescue.
Prediction, even forecasting, is very complex and difficult, fraught with many factors … a trend, constantly modified by changing the past with an algorithm that is verboten to the gaze of general public, is much easier to deal with.
Criticism will be answered with ad homs.
Hi Warwick,
I find the interactive map of Australian historical annual rainfall 1900-2013 helpful sometimes:
www.abc.net.au/news/2014-02-26/100-years-of-drought/5282030
Also, you may be interested in this report (link below for pdf download) which studies the past climate of the Echuca region. Some of their conclusions on climate seemed to based on cherry-picking, by ignoring the Federation Drought, if you closely look at their Figure 3 (historical max temp, min temp, rainfall composite of the Echuca region).
www.researchgate.net/publication/264971038_Learning_from_Indigenous_knowledge_for_improved_natural_resource_management_in_the_Barmah-Millewa_in_a_changing_and_variable_climate_Final_Report_to_the_Victorian_Centre_for_Climate_Change_Adaptation_
Cheers.
Thanks for reminding me of that John. I find that I blogged on that useful ABC compilation when it was produced in 2014. Note too their doomster title “100 years of drought”.
Not “100 years of Billions and Billions of dollars worth of productive rainfall distribution”.
I find this “Queensland’s extended wet/dry period poster (1889-2017)” very useful. My blog from a year ago – large version jpg of poster. Note Federation Drought 1896-1903 and note the years 1922-1948 in NSW. Imagine if the MDB were in that 27 year dry period now instead of just the 2018 drought.
I hear the Prime Minister on ABC news talking about 7 years of drought. Where is this?
These BoM maps show Australian drought areas for annual periods from 2011 to 2018.
Going back before 2011 you have to go to 2006 to get significant drought areas in the MDB. Just change the years and make maps for yourself. Where is ScoMo’s “7 years of drought” ?
1.40am 25Feb19 Going by Satellite Images the cloud mass of ex Cyclone Oma ended up east of its last position not north.
Thanks, Wazz! My son lives at Noosa. He said was catching some great waves there, Friday and Sunday. Solid 6 to 8 feet. Yep, surfers always talk in feet.
Thanks Warwick. I was trying to point out to Beachgirl the Qld extended dry & wet period poster. Further, I said the Federation Drought was the worst in Australia which has been extensively recorded. BOM does not want to know that because they start their records in 1910 ignoring all the well measured records twenty years prior. There was a lot of rain in the years 1890 to 1898 particularly in Qld. BOM can no longer be trusted with any data, especially the automated weather stations at airports. BOM does not understand how instruments measure, they do not understand UHI and and they do not understand the effect of land clearances together with domestic and industrial estates within and around airport sites.
“BOM does not understand how instruments measure, they do not understand UHI and and they do not understand the effect of land clearances together with domestic and industrial estates within and around airport sites.”
You may be right cementa, but I suspect it has more to do with the factors you raise being inconvenient truths the BOM prefers to ignore. Wall-to-wall confirmation bias within the organisation ensures that issues such as those you raise don’t make it through their “pal review” filter.