Higgins Storm Chasing (HSC) started as a website for thunderstorm photos and reports in 2010 and has snowballed into a Facebook page that boasts more followers than the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM).
The page, which has 1.1 million followers, is studded with dramatic images and videos of flooding, threatening storm clouds and lightning strikes.
Thomas Hinterdorfer is the chief forecaster, and when he isn’t chasing tornadoes in the United States, he’s forecasting Australia’s weather from a spare bedroom in Toowoomba.
1 Like
These weather pages do tend to overdramatise events though in the hope of garnering more likes. There are a few that provide a no-nonsense view; I recommend Anthony Cornelius on FB. A little biased towards NE NSW and SEQ as he’s based in Brisbane but does cover significant weather Aus wide.
I have dabbled in this space myself, mainly providing local weather for Bungendore. But it’s a time sink and keeps me on FB too long.
4 Likes
Thanks for the tip - being biased towards where I live helps me 
I also generally pay attention to what Tony Auden says, again Brisbane based being the weatherman on BTQ7 news, but is a meteorologist himself. He maintains a limited presence on Twitter and Facebook. A great TV weather journo who actually discussed the variability in forecasts and does it well.
1 Like
Tom Saunders does a similar thing in NSW (ABC) and also authors good weather articles on the ABC News website.
Messers Cornelius and Saunders both have the gift of taking complex weather information and explaining it in laypersons terms, whilst not dumbing down the essence and import of the information. That is a skill all journalists should aspire to have no matter their subject. Unfortunately in our ‘fast food, fast answers’ culture there is often little room for cogent analysis.
2 Likes
1 Like
My last day of Christmas holidays and of course I got nothing done that I really wanted to do. However, I managed to get lots of other things done that I wasn’t expecting. One was getting back to working on my weather website which is currently the basic Cumulus web template (for those who have used that software) however I am learning new coding things and making a much better one as time permits.
One thing though is I have got a webcam running again to make timelapse movies and to also have a full YouTube stream running 24/7. Why? Just because I can. For those who have subscribed to my YouTube channel, there will be more regional TV videos at times when I get through my collection of VHS tapes however it’s also going to be a weather site too now. Feel free to go and check things out and looking forward to getting more things on the website and getting it to a stage where I can get a preview version out there.
1 Like
Yeppoon just got its median rainfall this month in 2 days .
Last month in about 4 days.
We seem to be getting intense short duration events more these days.
Lawn dried out (sandy) 13 days between the dry spell up until early this month
2 Likes
Well done on this, looks like a professional setup. As an aside, I have much the same weather as you as I type this, relatively early in the day.
So I got around to tallying my rainfall recordings for 2024 because, well I’m a bit of a nerd and that’s something I like to do in the few moments I have spare when not chasing two children around…
2024 in Brisbane was, unsurprisingly, a wet year despite a relatively dry winter. Even being away for six weeks and not getting full recordings over those times, I still recorded just over 1550mm of rain for the year.
January was the wettest month, I recorded 339mm of rain then, closely followed by November with 331mm for the month. And 616mm of rain fell here between the start of November and the end of the year.
The wettest day was by my data 16 Feb (or more accurately, the 24 hours prior to 9am that day), where I tipped out 112mm from the gauge.
2 Likes
I reckon you’d get some orographic lift from Mount Co-otha and its associated massif, particularly in the moneymaking and prevailing SE’ly winds in Brisbane.
Bungendore is probably the driest town on the Southern Tablelands and by extension one of the driest places in the eastern half of NSW- only the Monaro is drier. Canberra had just below 600 mm but Bungendore would have been closer to 500 mm; most of the rain that fell last year was convective and Canberra gets a lot more thunderstorms. 500 mm would be semi arid in a lot of places, but our cooler annual temperatures mean that the semi arid threshold is a bit lower (400 mm or so).
We are also heavily rain shadowed to the east because of the Great Dividing Range. Go only 10 km east of Bungendore and rainfall prospects improve dramatically.