Rainfall
records fall in WA, NT, SAVery
cold day in Central Australia and SARogue
low brings further good rain to SE AustraliaIn the WA Kimberley, a monsoon-trough low that has been hovering offshore from Broome since Sunday gave Derby Airport 101mm in the 3 hours to midnight this morning, and a 24-hour to 9am total of 152mm. This is 30mm higher than the station's previous March record.
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| Water vapour satellite image for 2am WST/5am EDST today. The large area of yellow/orange is a storm/rain complex covering the southern Kimberley and Tanami Desert of the Northern Territory. Tropical moisture streams towards SE Australia, where a major cloudband is about to give the NSW Northern Tablelands heavy rain ahead of a clearly marked troughline. Separate bands of vapour wrap around the low which has just crossed the SA coast near Mt Gambier. NPMOC |
An area of storms and heavy rain developed yesterday afternoon in a trough extending ESE into the Northern Territory from this low. Winds converging from the N and NE into this trough also helped provide the lift needed to produce deep convection. The cloud mass can be seen on the water vapour satellite image (right) where the yellow and orange colours show high concentrations of moisture extending across northeastern WA into the Territory. At Rabbit Flat, a truck stop on the Tanami Road from Alice Springs to Wyndham WA, 171mm fell solidly over the 12 hour period to 9 this morning for a 24-hour total of 183mm, breaking the station's previous all-time one-day record of 139.7mm set on 2 February 1973. Unfortunately, the new automatic weather station at Flat Rabbit, as it is sometimes known, was not reporting, but the manual gauge readings gave 137mm over 9 hours to 6am and a further 34mm to 9am. Nearby Tanami Mine recorded 124.2mm for the 24 hour period.
In the southeast of the country, a repeat performance of last weekend's scenario was taking place. A secondary low developed on a cold front SW of Adelaide yesterday morning and moved ENE to cross the South Australian coast near Mount Gambier around 5 this morning, dropping the pressure at Mt Gambier Airport to 991.3hPa. Torrential rain (for this part of Australia -- the Airport's highest March one-day rainfall in 60 years has been 62.2mm) preceded the low, with 55mm recorded at the Airport to 9am, 33mm of that falling between 2.30 and 5.30am. To the north, Coonawarra with 50mm had its heaviest day's rain in an admittedly short 15 year record.
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| Maximum temperature variation from normal today. BoM |
It could have been a winter's day in Adelaide, and across much of Central Australia. The city recorded its coldest March day since 1946, and its second coldest since records began in 1839, with the temperature only getting to 15.5° during the day, but rising to 15.8 in the early hours of Thursday morning. With the wind at the airport gusting to 78km/h and showers heavy enough during the morning to cause local flooding, it felt colder. In the Northern Territory, Curtin Springs Homestead had the distinction of recording the Territory's coldest ever March day, with the thermometer only rising to 14.4°. Alice Springs Airport also broke the old record of 15.2 with a top of only 15.0.
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| Infrared satellite images (JCU) and surface charts (BoM) at 6 hourly intervals from 11am 20 March to 5am 22 March EDST. |  |
While Whilst last weekend's low passed through Bass Strait close to the Tasmanian coast, today's low moved inland through western Victoria and southern NSW, giving general falls of 20 to 30mm, often in a 3 to 6 hour period. Late today it had weakened and broken into a complex of small lows in northern and southern NSW, Bass Strait and east of Flinders Island. This shifted the cloud mass, which can be seen wrapping around the southern side of the low in the satellite image (right), southeast toward Tasmania. Late this afternoon, the cloud interacted with the developing low east of Flinders Island to drop 73mm in the 6 hours to 9pm at St Helens Airport on Tasmania's east coast. Meanwhile, another part of the cloudmass (shown ahead of a very marked clearing line in the satellite image) separated and moved ENE across the NSW Northern Tablelands and Slopes, giving 9am to 3pm totals of 53mm at Woolbrook, 34 at Inverell, 31 at Glen Innes Airport, and 30 at Tamworth Airport and Barraba.
This evening, thunderstorms gave falls of 50 to over 100mm along the Queensland coast from the NSW border to Rockhampton. The area of storms can be seen developing ahead of the same troughline that produced the heavy falls in NSW, but was a separate development. Brisbane City again received a downpour, with 74mm falling in an hour and a half to 9pm and Mt Mee, 50km NW of the city, recorded 112.6mm to 9am Thursday, most or all of which would have fallen in the storm. Flash flooding, some entering businesses, again occurred in parts of Brisbane badly flooded in the 9 March storm, while strong winds brought down power lines, blacking out Kallangur, Murarrie, Jimboomba, upper Caboolture, Red Hill and Paddington.