We have all seen the news over the weekend of flash flooding on the Eyre Peninsula and other areas of South Australia – this ABC article quotes the BoM saying “We’ve seen seven all-time records up until this point through the Eyre Peninsula largely,” Mr Lainio said. “Falls of anywhere between, say, 80 to 90 millimetres to over 150mm in a 24-hour period. Those locations have never seen falls of that amount.” I did a quick search for monthly rainfalls and found that an event in Feb 1946 seems in a similar ballpark to the big falls last weekend. 
Moonaree 16029 ~150km N of Kimba had over 200mm rain in Feb 1946 and 2 days around 18th registered 197mm. So here we have another instance of where the BoM aided & abetted by the ABC fail to find rain from BoM history. Map made at BoM “Recent and historical rainfall maps” – choose your time. Larger version Feb 1946 rain map.
Thanks for digging out this historic rainfall data Warrick.
I was wondering if it had happened before in SA and will dig around a bit more to see if there are other recorded instances.
And I will share this post of yours on BOM WEATHER WATCH on Facebook. with a link back here to your post.
Bill
Here are the results of a bit more digging at the BOM climate records for the small town of Kimba on the Eyre peninsular – the epicentre of this floods on the weekend
1921 : 101 mml over 3 days in February
1939 : 134 mml in November with 85 mml on the 3rd.
1946 : 162.5 mml in Feb with 149 falling on the 18th.
1974 : 140 mml in January over 3 days
1993 : 128 mml in January over 4 days.
In last week or so there have been several ABC/BoM articles reporting rainfall that IMHO tend to beat up rainfall as “unprecedented” or somehow out of the range of historic rain. We had the Eyre Peninsular downpours – then complaining about heavy rain around Townsville – at a time their dam levels are ~30% – and now Melbourne/Victoria thunderstorms are somehow written up as exceptional. Saying Mildura with 80.2mm on 27th has their heaviest January one day total. You only have to check 80km away at Robinvale 76053 which on 14Jan2011 had 94mm. So Mildura recording 80mm is no big deal. There must be records all over the wide brown land just waiting for the swings & roundabouts of rainfall. Notable rain over-nite was around Winton to Hughenden in central Qld where some areas have seen multi inches over a coupla days. The value to graziers & farmers would be in hundreds of $Millions but we seldom hear that. Yet let a bit of runoff slosh around to inconvenience somebody and the ABC/BoM is beating it up as unprecedented an obvious dog-whistle to “climate change”.
“then complaining about heavy rain around Townsville ”
Almost exactly nothing like unprecedented.
www.bom.gov.au/climate/maps/rainfall/?variable=rainfall&map=totals&period=month®ion=qd&year=1918&month=01&day=31