Call this bad weather?

 Our walk this morning was not pleasant. We rugged up and put on rain pants but decided to turn half-way along the Lagoon Boardwalk when a gust just about blew us over. That led to some conversation about whether this was the worst period of weather we have had since coming to Mallacoota: what seems like several days of cold, wet and windy.

So on returning I decided to interrogate my database of records for my weather station. My target observations were

• maximum hourly temperature <10C; and
• Maximum wind gust >20 kph; and
• Rain >1 mm.

Those conditions were met for at least 1 hour on 19 days since the WS was installed on 13 February 2019. Tallying the number of bad-weather hours by day gives the following scatterplot to 0600 on 25 August 2021.

The worst single day was 23 August 2020 when 7 hours met all the criteria. Where the dots are almost vertically above one another indicates that there was a multiday period in which the conditions were met on consecutive (or nearly consecutive) days. For example 20 July had 2 bad hours and another occurred on the 21st, and 27 May 2019 had a bad hour followed by 3 bad hours on 30 May 2019.

To my surprise there are no observations matching all three criteria in the period starting 0100 hrs on 23 August 2021 to 0600 on 25 August 2021. Were we just wimps? Fortunately extending the period to 0900 shows the maximum temperature in the hour as 9.9C ✔; Maximum wind gust 25.7 kph ✔and 1.2 mm of rain ✔. The hour to 1000 also got three ticks, (so that is 2 hours for the day) but by 1100 the maximum had risen above 10C to a toasty (?) 10.2C! So I conclude:

1. the weather was crap while we were walking; and
2. the criteria I used for defining bad weather were reasonable; but
3. in comparison to some other periods in the last 30 months it wasn't that bad!