Tuesday, November 17, 2009

The boy is hot

El Niño generally means hot dry summers here in Southeastern Australia. And while it is not yet officially summer, it sure feels like it. The mean November maximum temperature here in Canberra is 22.7 C (72.9 in Feudal units). So far, for the first half of November the mean maximum has been 29.3 (84.7 F). And the forecast is for low to mid 30’s for the rest of the week. And while the mean monthly rainfall is 64.6 mm, so far we have only had 0.8 mm, although there is a possibility of thunderstorms at the end of the week. I wonder what summer will be like? At the very least, this should be an interesting backdrop to the carbon trading debate currently raging in the air-conditioned halls on the hill.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Perhaps you could run another poll to guess what the maximum temperature of the summer will be... I'll guess a toasty 44C on or around 21 February...

C W Magee said...

In Canberra?

No way it will hit 44. We're at 600m elevation, so that's about 47 SLE. On the other hand, the black saturday temp was well over the previous record in VIC. But the Summer high will be in late Jan/ early Feb- take a look at the current records.

C W Magee said...

On the other hand, we missed the Nov record today by less than a degree- and the scary thing was that the dewpoint was below freezing. Ah, the single digit humidity...

Rod said...

Hmm, you guys must be sucking all the heat out of Mongolia. We're getting temperatures we normally don't get till late January, with -30 nighttime lows for most of the past week!

C W Magee said...

Is there a climate product somewhere that gives weekly global deviation from the medium-long term mean? For Australia it is:
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/temp_maps.cgi?variable=maxanom&area=nat&period=week&time=latest