Weather on 11 April

The weather on 11 April was interesting.  From the view of our power provider the word 'severe' was used when something broke about 1130 (but was fixed about 1700).

The official forecast for the day offered 4-10 mm of rain which is interpreted as 50% chance of more than 4 mm and 25% chance of more than 10 mm.  The computer forecast offered by Meteye was a bit heavier offering a range - at those probabilities - of  2.4 - 11.8 mm.  Meteye also gives a 10% forecast which was 27.4 m.  Here is the rain panel of the Meteye forecast from 0700 on the day.

 An early morning (0640) peek at the radar showed a nice belt of green heading our way from the West.

 By 0830 it was getting closer and some worthwhile totals shown behind it

 About midday the weather seemed fine after a few showers so I decided to go for a short bike ride.  It confirmed both axioms about Victorian weather:

• 4 seasons in one day; and 
• Don't like our weather?  Wait 5 minutes and it will be different!

I set off in pleasant sunshine and a breeze.  After 1 km it started to rain lightly with a strong wind.  at about 3km the rain got heavier and the breeze stronger.  Which was OK as I turned so had a tail wind.  By the time I got home the rain had stopped the sun was out and a gale was happening.

By 1640 hrs the radar image had a lot of crosses off the Gippsland Lakes,  That means lightning and would not  be a happy thought if one was up a power pole trying to fix something.

 In fact the lightning didn't get here until about 2000 hrs and gave a few pretty good flangs (flang = FLash and bANG).  Some of them were less than 1 km away which made me wonder about the longevity of the power restoration.  Rain was evident, as will be shown below.

The temperature was OK early in the day rising nearly to 20^oC during sunny spells.  A front came through about lunchtime and dropped the temperature noticeably.  The low temperature for the day was 9.4^oC around 1900 hrs,

 It was pretty windy at home with a peak gust of 48.3 kph around 1400 hrs.  I have shown both peak gust and hourly run in this chart: they're pretty much the same pattern.

 My records are almost calm compared to other records from BoM stations.

Mallacoota 65 kph at 1344

Gabo Is 107 kph at 0913

Wilsons Prom 132 kph at 1220 ; and

Hogan Island 143 kph at 1108

This led one correspondent to opine that they would like to sit out the passage of a cold front on Hogan Island as they would never complain about wind again.

Getting to the rain.  We got modest amounts through the day totaling to 8 mm by about 1800 hrs.  As shown in the next chart the falls got heavier as the evening wore on.

 I opined about 2100 hrs that the rain rate had not been unduly heavy.  Checking the results on 12 April shows that comment to have just preceded a blast (with flangs) at 180 mm/hr.  That is the 4th highest rate I have recorded in the 14 months we have been here.

So, cutting to the chase, how did Meteye perform?  Over the day as a whole the 10% probability was very close giving 27.4 mm of rain in comparison to the very handy 25 mm recorded.  (The BoM airport site recorded 30.4 mm and the Weather Underground site in town - physically about halfway between my WS and BoM - 28.2 mm.  Gabo Island only scored 10.8 mm demonstrating the localised impact of storm cells.)