Friday, 2 March 2012

Flood

Australia might be the driest continent, but sometimes it rains spectacularly and we're in the middle of one such event. Down in the southeast corner of this state (NSW) wide areas have rainfall up to 250mm over the last three days (that's 10 inches for the metrically challenged). There's a whole lot more on the way as the strange conditions we have are due to last for another three days. Basically, the jet stream is stalled in a line from Broome in NW Australia diagonally across the country to the Australian Capital Territory (ACT, where Bec and Max live). The jet-stream is feeding in moist tropical air feeding heavy rainfall along the line and I gather some places may have had their entire average rainfall in the last few days. After the rain comes the flood and right now an area larger than the entire nation of France (i.e. much larger than the UK) is going under water!

How are we going in Armidale. Well it has just started to rain lightly mid-afternoon, but we'll get nothing like the south of NSW. Indeed while they were drowning in sheets of water we had sunny days with pleasant temperatures up to 28C and that was 10C above Canberra's dismal temperatures today. As we entered Autumn on 1 March we had summer weather than the POMS could only dream of. Peculiar, eh?

Postscript. Some places in the west of NSW had more than their average annual totals this week. And Alice Springs has just been flooded!

By the way, this is my 468th post to this BLOG since 2007, quite a good record.

AS

1 comment:

Richard said...

Hello No 468. A good read as usual. How we wish we (meaning the Water Companies) had your rain in the UK as we have a drought situation in the south east and some areas such as Kent are talking about a shortage so serious that they may have to cut off the water supply to houses and erect stand-pipes in the street for the people to get their water. Who would have thought it! Richard.