Easter Weather

 In my youth I worked on a farm in the UK.  One of my co-workers had done National Service in the British Army and used a couple of forms of a phrase he had learnt in that occupation.   

The simplest variant was "Mother, sell the pig and buy me out!"  which had as a standard response "Son, the pig has died.  Stay where you are." The less polite version was "Mother it's a bastard.  Buy me out."  earning the response "Son, so are you, but don't tell your father."

In that example "it" was a very general term covering the food, the local population where they were posted and. most commonly, their officers.  Today I use the second version with particular reference to the weather over the past few days.

I'll start with lighting strikes early on 8 April.

Here is incoming rain courtesy of BoM radar at 0523.  (I'll include an hour-by-hour rain chart towards the end of this post.)

The day was pretty overcast and miserable so probably a good thing that Frances turned the hot water booster on in the evening.  That may have been catalysed by me noting that Meteye was forecasting a perceived temperature of +1C at 10 am on the 9th.  (As an aside BoM reports an apparent temperature at the Airport of 1.3C at 1130 am!)  

Here is the stream of showers as at 0642.  Note this was a quick snap as the power was out (and had been since about 3:30am.

The weather was ordinary on our walk, summarised by this photo from the Lagoon Boardwalk looking across to the (invisible).Howe Range.

I think the power came back around 0900.  I went to see if the Betka River had opened up yet.  The answer was 'no' but the waves were breaking over the bar so there is a good chance with the higher tide tonight (plus more flow down the river).

The birds included at least 7 Hooded Plovers as well as at least 100 Crested Terns, 9 White-faced Herons and ~20 Red-necked Stints.

The surf was pounding away at Bastion Point.

In this image note the height of the spray going up off the distant Gabo Island Lighthouse.  To be able to see that at 14km distance is pretty impressive.

When I got home the garage door wouldn't open.  Yes, the power was out again.  This time it didn't come back until 1730 hours!  Of course AUSNET were totally silent about the cause of the outage and why the town battery didn't kick in. This is interesting from their website:

"We do what's right: We act with integrity and in the best interests of our company and our customers."

Note that the interests of the company are put before their customers.  They claim to be an Australian company - which probably means something although I am not sure what - but are part of a Canadian asset management operation.

Enough with those slack 🤬s.  The total rainfall over the 4 days was 75.6 mm.  On my WS over the period the maximum temperature was 22.1C on Good Friday (a touch above average for 7 April) while the minimum was 9.1C on Monday 10 April.  That is > 1 SD below average for the month, a criterion also matched by the maximum for the day, making it a Cold Day by my definition.

Here are a few graphs of the weather to date. In each case the x axis shows the time, from 0100 on 8 April to 0500 on 10 April

The first chart shows rainfall.  I am surprised at the amount late on the 8th - but I was asleep through that!

The second chart is the cumulative fall.

This chart shows the rain rate.  The falls ~50 mm are in the heaviest 5% of falls I have recorded.  The heaviest rate  (73.4 mm/hr, at 11pm on the 9th) is in the top 2.3%.

The next chart has the recorded temperature for each hour and the wind chill temperature, calculated by my WS, for the same time.  I suspect the model used by BoM is more sophisticated and I know the site at the Airport is far more exposed to an evil Southerly wind.

 

The final chart show wind run (line) and the difference between recorded temperature and wind chill (columns).  It is always nice when common sense and concept line up: the stronger the wind the greater the wind chill factor.

I shall re-examine these charts if there is further interesting weather before the weekend ends.