Monthly Archives: November 2012

3-year trends to October 2012

Posted in 3-year climate trends, Manilla NSW by

Parametric plots of smoothed climate variables at Manilla

“Rushing into drought”Trends to October 2012.

In October, while daily maximum temperature remained not far above normal, raw values of all other monthly mean anomalies (except minimum temperature and soil temperature) moved further in the “drought” direction. Most extreme was the dew point, which was nearly seven degrees below normal! Daily temperature range was also extremely wide. Rainfall was very low,and cloudiness lower than in recent months.
Minimum temperature anomaly moves erratically. October’s extremely low value resulted from moderate maximum temperature and extreme daily temperature range.
Subsoil temperature returned to normal after seven months above normal.

Fully-smoothed data (in red) now include April 2012. All variables for that month show an advance towards the top right corner of the graphs (typical of droughts).
The April 2012 value of smoothed dew point anomaly (-2.00°) is a new record low for smoothed data, beating the record of July 2011 (-1.70°).

Note: Fully smoothed data – Gaussian smoothing with half-width 6 months – are plotted in red, partly smoothed data uncoloured, and raw data for the last data point in orange. January data points are marked by squares. Blue diamonds and the dashed blue rectangle show the extreme values in the fully smoothed data record since September 1999.

Arid October 2012

Posted in Manilla NSW, Monthly weather by

The daily weather logWeather log October 2012.

Many days this month had weather you might expect in a desert. Cold nights and warm days made the temperature range very wide. Very dry air sent morning dew points below zero several times.
Very cold cloudy weather on the 11th and 12th brought 11.2 mm of rain, but two cool cloudy spells later brought little more.

 Comparing October monthsClimate October 2012.

Nights, at 8.6°, were the coldest for October, 2.3° colder than average.
The mean morning Dew Point of 1.7° is an amazing low-humidity value for October, 6.6° below average! Low humidity brought less October cloud than seen since 2004.
The very low rainfall of 12.6 mm is in the 11th percentile for October. While rainfall totals for 12 months or more are all above normal, there has been little recent rain. The 2-month total (33 mm) is a serious rainfall shortage (9th percentile) and the 3-month total (44 mm) is a severe rainfall shortage (3rd percentile). Similar shortages of rainfall have developed in a broad band from Sydney to Perth.

Data. Rainfall data is from Manilla Post Office, courtesy of Phil Pinch. Temperatures, including subsoil at 750 mm, and other data are from 3 Monash Street, Manilla.