Early September weather event

There has been a fair amount of noise on the BoM site about the amount of rain  expected in East Gippsland over the weekend of 4 -5 September.  This includes a flood watch for the Genoa River, which feeds in to the Mallacoota Inlet.

We only had 0.6 mm of rain overnight (according to my WS).  Of course, the precipitation increased after dawn giving a total of 7mm by 0900.  Then when we went for our morning walk it rained solidly dropping 3 mm in about 45 minutes.  By 1400 we have staggered up to 13.6 mm in total and by 2100 a further 3 mm so up to 17.6mm.  

The radar shows that there are likely to be sprinkles for the rest of the afternoon at least.

In terms of flooding, judging by the River Height gauge at Genoa Gorge, J Pluvius has got a lot of work to do before there is a problem.

It looks, from eyeballing the line, as though the height of the water has actually dropped over the last 4 days reflecting the drop which is very noticeable in Bottom Lake and The Narrows.  Looking at the table underlying that chart shows that it has dropped from1.05m on 31 August  to 0.86m at noon on 4 September.  As only 3.6 mm of rain has been recorded at Bombala AWS (close to the headwaters of the Genoa River) it doesn't look as though there is going to be a lot of liquid coming down there!  However by early morning on 5 September the fall at Bombala AWS was up to 21 mm so there might be some run off by a couple of days time.

At 0930 on the 5th the Bairnsdale radar showed a fair amount f rain to our West but not here.

I don't trust anything much that comes out of Bairnsdale and in this case I applied weather forecasting rule 1: look out the window.

Have we moved to Brigadoon?  (I have poor memories of this film as romantic mush but 

directed by Vincent Minelli; a screen play by Alan Jay Lerner; and starring Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse - I may have been a little hasty!)   

We are now (0950) up to 6.2 mm for the day.  With the temperature dropping to 10.9C and gusts of up to 30kph we are getting close to the criteria of the CWI (crap weather index),  By 1300hrs the temperature had dropped below 10C which together with a gust of 29 kph and 1.4 mm of rain in the last hour  made it officially crap weather.

I wondered what effect the rain was having on the Inlet and on checking the gauge it was up to 0.24m.

I went for a short drive, within my 5km bubble, and found there was quite a bit of run-off at Bucklands ...

... and coming out of Shady Gully.

The sea was about as rough as I have ever seen it.

In the past someone commented about the blowhole at Fisherman's Point but I had never seen such a feature there.  Then I noticed the pool of foam at the right hand edge of the image above was pulsing as swells came in. I couldn't see into it - and in the conditions was not about to wander below the lookout - but this was clearly a blowhole

In this image some blown foam is just visible.

Here is a digiscoped view of Gabo.  At times it looked as though the breaking waves were almost reaching the base of the lighthouse!

There was a drop more rain on the morning of the 6th putting my total for the event up to 40.2mm.  The water level in the Inlet was up a fair amount (to 0.48m) as illustrated by these two images.  In the recent past there was significant exposed mud in the lagoon.

I have also checked the BoM gauge at Genoa Gorge.  The high reading there (so far) was 1.47 m, a rise of 0.5m, still a good way below minor flood level (~2.1m).