Climate, Weather and Emergencies

All I know is…if I’m sweating after 10 seconds, it’s friggin’ hot both inside and outside the car.

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Even though Melbourne will hit 39C tomorrow (was to be 41C), I was a bit surprised that a total fire ban was not declared for the central region of Victoria, which includes the city.

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Car temperature readings often differ from the Bureau of Meteorology’s current readings for two reasons:

  1. If the car isn’t moving at reasonable speed the temperature can be higher or lower than ambient due to the difference between where the sensors are and where the car just was (such as in a cool garage), so it can take a few minutes to adjust to reality.
  2. Official weather stations take readings at 10 m altitude, not at ground/road-level which can be hotter or cooler depending on the situation.

In my case I’d been driving at reasonable speed for long enough (I’d driven through the Harbour tunnel & on the M5), and looking at past experience with this car I think the reading was reasonably accurate for ground level in the particular area I was at the time.

Of course dark road surface with the sun beating down on it all day is going to get hotter than even just 20 m off the side of the road.

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This is most unusual… Darwin showing such cool daytime temps (below as at 5.30pm AEDST today). Their top temp today was only 28.

Not sure how CALM is 30 km/h!

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I think temperature readings are all taken at 1.5m in the Stevenson screens where they have (well, used to when I had a chance to work in them) a digital thermometer which was able to provide the information through to the computers to be sent back to the BoM but they also had some proper mercury thermometers for calibrating with a thermometer for air temp and one for wet bulb.

Wind direction and speed were all taken from the anenometer at a height of 10m along with all other clearance restrictions so that temperatures and winds aren’t influenced by other factors, buildings, concrete, trees etc…

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Definitely correct.
Wind speeds are recorded at 10 metres above ground, rainfall is recorded at about 30 centimetres above ground, and temperature and everything else is recorded about 1.5 metres above ground level.

Quite a few years ago I helped out taking the 9am manual observation at a weather station at a post office in regional QLD for a little while. The thermometers are located at about shoulder height.

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Forgot about the rainfall! I serviced and calibrated a few of those while doing my work experience. They use the TBRG (Tipping Bucket Rain Gauge) where just like many home weather station automatic ones it has a funnel on the top and inside the rain will fall into like a see-saw type arrangement and after 0.2mm is in the one bucket it weighs it down and tips out and registers an increment. This is why the minimum amount of rain that can be measured is 0.2mm increments, anything less and it may get recorded as a Trace - where they know it rained but it was bugger all. In the tropics when it rains those buckets can be tipping very quickly inside it during some of those downpours! Tasmania is also quite affected by snow melt with their readings, so a lot of rain will pass across the state and fall as snow in elevated areas and not much rain will be recorded over those stations but over the next day or two it might be sunny across the whole state yet Mt Wellington for instance records 5mm of rain - which wasn’t rain it was just the snow melting.

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Maybe there is a cyclone on its way for Perth next weekend.
http://www.farmonlineweather.com.au/models/?lt=wzcountry&lc=aus&mt=accessg&mc=mslp&mso=0&mh=240&focus=mh

Thanks for correcting my faulty memory.

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Wouldn’t trust a single 10-day model at it’s very furthest.
Far less than a “maybe”.

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I thought it was BOM related is it not?

Where it comes from isn’t relevant, weather models are computer generated and are at their most inaccurate when they’re as far out as they can go.

There’s good reason why the BOM wouldn’t warn people of a potential cyclone track that’s forecasted more than 24 - 48 hours, for instance.

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Always going to happen in a progressing society. Everything becomes more expensive and higher.

The key is managing the response as you know the rest will happen regardless.

What? Are you denying the easy to prove, basic physics, of the greenhouse effect (global warming) due to increased CO2 in the atmosphere?

I am always open to reports, but at the end of the day as a society we need to be more sustainable because it is the right thing to do, rather than because of an “emergency” which after 5-10 years is not really an emergency.

We can start by not breeding as much. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Thinking it’s not an emergency ignores the gradual build-up and long tail of those gasses in the atmosphere, which will continue stopping heat escaping the planet for decades to come.

It’s a fact that we (society) don’t need to keep burning fossil fuels & polluting the atmosphere, especially not for electricity, and with any long-term thinking it’ll be cheaper to clean up our act now instead of dealing with all the damage (& costs) being caused by the more frequent/more damaging extreme weather events.

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56 homes destroyed in bushfire in WA