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 Heatwave conditions intensify in the Centre and Southeast
Sat 29 Dec 2018
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 Extreme temperatures extended into Central Australia today 29th and continued to bring sweltering weather to the SW half of NSW and along the Murray Valley. BoM |
The huge heat dome covering large parts of the continent continued to affect the WA Interior, and moved into Central Australia to give Alice Springs Airport the hottest day experienced there in nearly 80 years. Also, on Saturday morning 29th, the Snowy Mountains and much of the Murray Valley sweltered with minimum temperatures the warmest for December in decades. Full records are in the AWN DWS for today.
Alice Springs recorded a top temperature of 45.6°, the all-time highest at the Airport station since it opened in 1941. The previous all-time record was 45.2 in January 1960 while the hottest December day was 44.2 in 1972. 275km S of Alice Springs on the Stuart Highway, almost on the NT/SA border, Kulgera equalled its all-time highest temperature on record (45.5°, 40-year history), while Curtin Springs (46.0°, 53 years), Yuendumu (44.8, 46 years) and Yulara (46.0, 31 years) all had their hottest December days.
Weather records at The Alice go back a long way for such an isolated location. Because a telegraph repeater station was established there in 1871, a weather station was set up only seven years later transferring to the Post Office site in town in 1932. The highest temperature recorded before observations moved to the Airport was 47.5° at the old Telegraph Station on 24 December 1891, 1.9° higher than today's new record.
But there's a but. This photo of the Telegraph Station taken in 1880, two years after the weather station was established, shows how it was encircled by ridges of the MacDonnell Ranges. The temperatures are believed to have been taken in a Stevenson type screen, and it's known the screen was surrounded by a 1m high rock wall painted white. Both the surrounding wall and the nearby ridges would have reflected heat and interrupted wind flow creating a suntrap effect at the site. The Airport, however, is on an open plain 12km S of the city and 8km away from the MacDonnells. It is likely that the old Telegraph Station site was a warmer one than the Airport, but as the two stations never operated simultaneously to allow comparisons, we can only speculate whether today's Airport record would have beaten that of the Telegraph Station in a fair fight.
Elsewhere, people in parts of the Murray Valley had one of the hottest nights they've known, but a "cool" front moving through during the day gave more modest daytime temperatures in the mid to high 30s. Hume Reservoir just east of Albury had its warmest-ever night with a low of 28.4° in 55 years of observations, while Griffith Airport's 31.0° was its highest in 48 years. Six other stations set new December records including Thredbo and Cabramurra.
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