Checkout the rainfall Outlook for March and compare with month to date rainfall percentages for Australia and you will see the small areas on the east coast where BoM can claim success. Set against the vast areas of heavy March rainfall elsewhere across wide brown land where BoM Outlook has had stellar failure.
Below here actual rainfall percentages to the 23rd March
It is very clear with the rainfall pattern, barometric pressure patterns, weather progression and radar images that the weather is coming from the west. It appears that cold fronts (and lows pressure systems) are coming from the south west (from cold southern ocean) traveling in a north east direct. At the same time there is an upper atmospheric higher pressure system with moist air from the warm Indian ocean originating in the north west and traveling south east. The two system are converging in NSW to dump lots of rain. Nothing new about that. Yet, some are blaming the weak La Nina which is a Pacific ocean system and with strong La Ninas can result in cyclones which have a landfall from the east onto the Qld. coast. can not recall if BOM with their models was predicting a large influence from La Nina. There are further fools like Prof Steffen (whose base study was Industrial Chemistry and was named in the Climate gate emails for organising a meeting of AGW alarmists & IPPC supporters in Moscow Russia) who are pushing the “climate change” barrow.
PS the SOI which is a indicator of droughts and rainfall for Qld. is at zero for the 30d running trend and maybe positive by the end of March -this shows an end of La Nina.
>” … an end of La Nina” [part comment from cementafriend]
Well, this episode, anyway.
Certainly this one has sloshed slugs of warm Pacific Ocean water to pile up on the east coast and increased the humidity of air flows driven inland. Where I live, west of Sydney but at 1200m ASL, the low, humid, drizzly (depressing) cloud cover down to about 600m ASL has been here for many months now with only a random day or two of relief. Wind direction has been a relentless south-easterly.
Sadly, the vegetation growth from all this water will fuel the next bushfire season when a drying el Nino takes hold again. That too will be the work of the debil-debil CO2 (at atmospheric 420 ppmv – so scary) and the sinful, greedy Western culture.
It has appeared to me watching the nullschool wind video everyday for the last few years that the LaNina was pushing warm water past Vietnam, Cambodia and through the Indonesian Archipelago to the top end NT and Kimberley, bringing a very wet and strong wet season, extending the weather band to the South East.
Cambodia and Vietnam had a lot of flooding as did most of SEAsia.
Here in central Victoria we had wind and rain from the NE which is an unusual direction to receive rain from at our location. The strong NE wind and driving rain in the early hours of Monday 22 March somehow managed to leave hundreds of tiny snails on our verandah? We have not seen this type of snail around here before and a bit of web searching indicates they are probably "small pointed snails". Apparently they grow to about 10mm shell length, although our specimens were around 5mm long. See article linked.
I wonder if they could have been swept up and deposited by the NE wind.
For sure the 90 day SOI is trending down towards neutral zone now – will just have to watch and see if El Nino conditions chip in.
Your account of snails apparently airborne takes some getting head around. Easy to imagine a tornado picking up snails with dust and debris but carrying them significant distances seems a stretch. Yet as you say “We have not seen this type of snail around here before…”.
Keith Pitt interview on SkyNews by Peta Credlin
Bob’s comment refers to rain coming from the East at Castlemaine. While unusual, rain from the east has been associated with heavy rainfall events in that area in the past. Anecdotally, this was the case on 22 October 1934 when an area in north-central Victoria, not that far from Castlemaine, had nearly 8 inches (40% of its average annual rainfall of around 20 inches) all in the one day. At one location, the apparent centre of this ‘cloud-burst’ event, more than 60% of the average annual rainfall was received in the month of October that year. BOM hasn’t removed or blended these recordings yet!
One seems justifiably fearful as to the consequences of the potential media, public and political reaction to such an event, if it were to occur now in the current ‘climate change’ era.
Jim
Thanks Jim of Kew – you are correct there was way over previous max rainfall at Castlemaine Post Office 88014 on 22Oct1934 when 134.6mm was recorded. (I have not searched for other sites nearby in 1934) That 134.6mm reading is still higher than the daily max for any month at the Prison current site. This map for Oct1934 does not seem to pay that 22Oct1934 rain due respect.
Thanks Jim interesting history.
The event was certainly unusual for us here 10km south of Castemaine. We recorded 7.0 mm on Sunday 21st, 9.5 mm on Monday 22nd and 4.0 mm on Tuesday 23rd. Monday morning was the period with the strongest NE winds and our reading of 9.5 mm was 10.0 mm less than what our neighbours recorded just 200 M away. I suspect this wide discrepancy may have something to do with the location of our gauge just below the eastern brow of a steep hill, where the wind streamline flow would have likely been quite steeply upwards. We haven't noted such a large discrepancy before.
Eberys (88021) about 10 km WSW of here had 12.0 mm, 17.4 mm and 7.0 mm respectively over the three days. Neither Newstead (88048) nor Vaughan (88108) have data yet for the period.
Newstead (88048), BOM ‘Climate Data on Line’, Daily Rainfall, seems to record 200.2 mm for the 22nd October 1934.
I believe there are newspaper references too, available via Trove, about the ‘cloud burst’ in that district on that day. Residents of the time spoke of the restricted visibility that this heavy rain event created, for hours on end.