Category Archives: Australian Climate

More Droughts After Heavier Rains I.

Posted in Australian Climate, Climate Change, Manilla NSW, Rainfall from 1883 by

Log of 1-year droughts and 5-year lagged heavy rainfalls

Droughts and flooding rains at Manilla NSW were related in a way that is remarkable and unexpected.

Part 1. Graphical logs

As the first graph shows, for most of the 130-year record year-long droughts came in direct proportion to very heavy daily rainfall five years earlier. (For data details, see Note 1, below.)
The match between these two variables is astonishing. Both are based on rainfall readings, but they are scarcely related. Excessive daily rainfalls are transient extreme weather events; 12-month droughts are an aspect of climate.

Mackellar’s “Droughts and flooding rains”

Dorothea Mackellar’s famous line * is more apt for this graph than for other graphs where I use “flooding rains” to mean periods unlike drought. (See Note 2. below.) The rains and droughts that I plot here both bring hardship. Severe droughts lasting one year are among the worst of droughts: long enough to use up reserves, and not so long as to be eased by periods of rain. The daily rainfall events plotted are the ones that cause damaging floods.

Features of the graphical log

Log of 1-year droughts and heavy rainfalls

This second graph shows the data at the actual dates. Although the data points for the decade excess of heavy daily rainfall and those for frequency % of 12-month droughts have a matching pattern for much of the record, the pattern is offset. Heavy rainfall points come five years earlier than corresponding drought points. Notice that the heavy rainfalls do not (except in 1980) come squarely in gaps between droughts.
Lagging the rainfall points by five years (as in the first graph) makes some matches almost exact. Such matches occur at all data points from 1890 to 1975, except those from 1940 to 1955, where drought frequencies are relatively higher. Both variables show a two-decade-long, slow decline from 1905 to 1925. At the chosen scales, the amplitude of corresponding rises and falls are usually similar as well.
After 1975, daily rainfall oscillates through a wide amplitude with a twenty-year period, while the frequency % of drought varies Continue reading →

Very Wet Days at Manilla: Decade Excesses

Posted in Australian Climate, Climate Change, Manilla NSW, Rainfall from 1883 by

Log of decade totals of rainfall excess, Manilla, NSW Last month I posted a complete log of days at Manilla that had more than 50 mm of rainfall.
I call days that have more than 50 mm of rainfall “very wet days”. At Manilla, on the average, these have come only once per year. Days with more than 50 mm of rainfall have no special meaning, but they can be taken as a rough indication that local flooding, or even general flooding, is likely: the “Flooding Rains” of Dorothea Mackellar.*
The graph I posted did not show whether these very wet days, likely to cause floods, had a bigger effect at some times than at others. This graph shows that.

Since it is only the excess rainfall that runs off, leading to flooding, I have subtracted 50 mm from each “very wet day” rainfall amount. Then I have summed all such excesses for each half-decade. I summed the half-decades in pairs to give a decade sum (in mm) centered on the years 1885, 1890, 1895, etc. For example, the decade centered on 1925 had a total of daily rainfall excesses of 157 mm. (Values for 1880-84 were estimated from those for 1883 and 1884.)
Some decades had very high values of excess rainfall: there was about 250 mm in the decades centered on 1900, 1960, 1965, 1980, and 2000. There were very low values, below 100 mm, in the decades centered on 1885, 1890, 1950, and 1990. There appears to be no trend.

Note added June 2015.

The close similarity of two graphs, the one of heavy rainfalls in this post, and the one of year-long droughts in an earlier post led me to write a further series of three posts:
More droughts After Heavier Rains I.
More droughts After Heavier Rains II.
More droughts After Heavier Rains III.

* By arrangement with the Licensor, The Dorothea Mackellar Estate, c/- Curtis Brown (Aust) Pty Ltd.

Managing my low-energy house: II. Features needing attention

Posted in Australian Climate, Indoor Climate, Manilla NSW by
Photo of clear-story area with winter sun and a fan

Clear-story fan set for winter

This post, and the companion post “I. Features needing no attention“ were posted originally to a forum of the Alternative Technology Association (See Note below.)

My low-energy house at Manilla, NSW, maintains year-round comfort in a climate of daily and seasonal extremes. In the climate classification of the Building Code of Australia, it is in Zone 4: “Hot dry summer, cool winter”, along with Tamworth, Mildura and Kalgoorlie.
This house differs from most houses in relying on the design of the house to achieve comfort, with hardly any energy needed for heaters or coolers.
There is little artificial control: the “home automation system” consists only of timers set twice a year. Some of the comfort features call for daily action in certain seasons. However, these simple daily chores could have been avoided by small changes in the design. [But see “Note added 2016.”]

The success of the house in maintaining comfort in all seasons is shown by scatter-plots of daily indoor and outdoor maximum and minimum temperatures over a period of three years.

Features re-set twice a year

Dates for re-sets

For part of each year, the Manilla climate is too hot for comfort, and for the rest it is too cold. Some house features are re-set twice a year, making a “winter regimen” and a “summer regimen”. At first, I set the change-over dates near the equinoxes, 20th March and 22nd September. For simplicity I changed on 1st April and on 1st October. Later, I found it better to change on 1st March and 1st November, because the time when the climate is too hot is shorter than the time when it is too cold.

Motorized curtains

Curtains fitted to five north-facing windows, and a shutter fitted to a sun-porch window, should be opened to admit winter sun and closed at night to trap the heat. In summer they should be closed by day to keep out radiant heat and opened at night to allow heat to radiate out. The curtains and the shutter have motors controlled by a programmable timer (at lower right in the photo). In autumn (1st March), the timer is set to open at 07:40 and close at 17:20 daily. In spring (1st November) the timer is set to open at 18:00 and close at 06:00 (Standard Time).

Clear-story windows and fans

Continue reading →

Managing my low-energy house: I. Features needing no attention

Posted in Australian Climate, Indoor Climate, Manilla NSW by
Photo of sunlit house interior

July sun heats the house

This post, and the companion post “II. Features needing attention” were posted originally to a forum of the Alternative Technology Association (See Note below.)

My low-energy house at Manilla, NSW, maintains year-round comfort in a climate of daily and seasonal extremes. In the climate classification of the Building Code of Australia, it is in Zone 4: “Hot dry summer, cool winter”, along with Tamworth, Mildura and Kalgoorlie.
This house differs from most houses in relying on the design of the house to achieve comfort, with hardly any energy needed for heaters or coolers.
There is little artificial control: the “home automation system” consists only of timers set twice a year. Some of the comfort features call for daily action in certain seasons. However, these simple daily chores could have been avoided by small changes in the design. [See “Note added 2016” below.]

The success of the house in maintaining comfort in all seasons is shown by scatter-plots of daily indoor and outdoor maximum and minimum temperatures over a period of three years.

I. Features needing no attention

Heat transfer to and from the heat bank

The mass of concrete, bricks and rubble under the concrete floor slab is edge-insulated with foam to a depth of half a metre to prevent heat leaking sideways to and from the surrounding soil and subsoil. This 150 tonne edge-insulated under-floor mass is a “heat bank” which absorbs and yields heat so slowly that it holds the same temperature (at 750 mm depth) within a degree for weeks at a time.
Double-brick walls (17 tonnes) inside the house, and the floor slab itself (28 tonnes), are also parts of the heat bank. Their exposed surfaces (See photo.) absorb heat from sunshine (and yield heat to cool flows of air) so as to spread heat (or coolness) around the rooms. Within each day they conduct heat to and from the rooms of the house, and from room to room. They then conduct heat slowly to and from the under-floor mass.
In the absence of the house, the under-floor mass would have the same temperature as the subsoil of the area. A thermometer at 750 mm in the subsoil near the house shows a 14.6° yearly temperature range, from 12.9° to 27.5°. Even an ordinary light-weight, poorly-insulated house built on a concrete slab on the ground here would be made more comfortable by these stable subsoil temperatures. Midsummer and midwinter temperatures in such a house (next door) are plotted here and here.
It is clear that temperatures in that conventional house vary much less than outdoor temperatures, and remain close to that of the subsoil. The heat bank under my solar-passive house has an even more stable temperature than that of the surrounding subsoil. (There is a graph showing one year of heat bank and subsoil temperatures here.)

Insulation

Thermal insulation reduces the flow of heat in and out of the house. With sufficient insulation, the heat of the day is replaced by the cool of night before the house becomes too warm. Insulation improves comfort permanently. Continue reading →

Log of Very Wet Days at Manilla.

Posted in Australian Climate, Climate Change, Manilla NSW, Rainfall from 1883 by

Graphical log of days with over 50mm rain

In the 130-year record of very wet days at Manilla, NSW, extreme rainfalls have not become more common recently.

Data

I arranged all daily rainfall readings for Manilla, NSW, from March 1883 to December 2014 in order of rainfall amount, and selected only the 125 readings greater than 50 mm. I plotted the values against the date, expressed in years, to two decimal places. (See Note below.)

Result

The five highest readings

The five highest readings, greater than 110 mm per day, include events that gave rise to two floods and the filling of a reservoir newly-built to store water for irrigation. The highest daily reading, 142.7 mm, came with the highest flood known at Manilla, in 14/01/1964. Thus, the highest flood matches the highest daily rainfall. That is because nearly all the flood-water came down the Manilla River, which flows in a semi-circle, with none of the catchment area far away from the rain-gauge.
These five highest readings seem to fly in an arc above the rest, with a peak near the middle of the graph. The rise and fall of this arc may have no meaning, for there are very long gaps between the events. All the same, it is a fact that there were no readings above 110 mm per day in the decades before 1910 or after 1998.

Periods with no daily readings over 80 mm

Continue reading →