5 November 2015

Storms light up the capital, rain to continue

| Charlotte
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Storm shot

Canberra was lit up like a Christmas tree last night as a noisy thunderstorm swept in bringing nearly 20mm rain with it.

Pets hid inside and those of us who were stuck out in the storm alternated between being enthralled at the light show and frightened of being struck by lightning.

RiotACT contributor Gabrielle Kneipp was out taking photos of views for her Best of Canberra lookouts story and sent us this shot taken at around 8pm from Dairy Farmers’ Hill. We’d love to publish your photos of the storm, so please share them with us via our Facebook page or on Twitter.

The Bureau of Meteorology says there is a chance of thunderstorms again on Thursday, when there is an 80% chance of rain, but we can expect more showers before then, with a 40% chance of rain tomorrow and an 80% chance on Wednesday. Today may be your best bet for getting the washing dry all week with only a 20% chance of rain. There is a 70% chance of rain on Saturday and 50% on Sunday.

The overnight rain was nearly as much as the entire October rainfall of 26mm, but that’s perhaps not surprising when you consider it was the hottest October on record with average temperatures of 24.8 degrees compared to the long term average for the mid-spring month of 19.5.

October 5 was the earliest October day to see temperatures over 30 degrees since records began.

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In fact – going out on a limb here – but I would guess from looking at that last trend map that it shows that humidity is on the decrease in our part of the land.

The references to temperature in the penultimate paragraph seem to imply that heat is associated with rainfall.
I’m not sure what that’s all about, but our excellent BoM has good trend maps for temperature and rainfall in Australia.
Rainfall:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/index.shtml#tabs=Tracker&tracker=trend-maps&tQ%5Bmap%5D=rain&tQ%5Barea%5D=aus&tQ%5Bseason%5D=0112&tQ%5Bperiod%5D=1970
You can see that the ACT is experiencing a long-term trend of decreasing rainfall at the rate of -30mm/decade.

The trend in temperature for the ACT is showing a long-term increase of 0.25 degrees per decade:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/index.shtml#tabs=Tracker&tracker=trend-maps&tQ%5Bmap%5D=tmean&tQ%5Barea%5D=aus&tQ%5Bseason%5D=0112&tQ%5Bperiod%5D=1970

My reading of that is that for our particular situation, increased temperature is associated with decreased rainfall.

As a side note, the trend for maximum temperatures is shpowing a faster increase than the trend for minimum temperatures, so the diurnal temperature range is increasing 40% more quickly than the mean temperature is:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/index.shtml#tabs=Tracker&tracker=trend-maps&tQ%5Bmap%5D=dtr&tQ%5Barea%5D=aus&tQ%5Bseason%5D=0112&tQ%5Bperiod%5D=1970

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