Foggy Canberra

Canberra in winter is a cold place.

 

The bike path to work

 Foggy weather tends to lend itself to black and white photography

It is also a foggy place in the mornings. Fog is Canberra's default state early in winter mornings.  It lasts some mornings more than others and so far this year, its generally been gone before I've got out of the house in the mornings.  But when it does linger it is very pretty.

Part of campus. Black Mountain, which normally looms over the uni, is invisible

The fog also affects the airport as you might expect.  If you're not on the first flight out in the mornings (which is already at the airport overnight so has few issues with landing) then its inadvisable to schedule a flight before 10:30am.

Artsy shot!

Summer days, winter nights, Autumn in Canberra

Its Autumn in Canberra, the city's second best season (after Spring apparently).  Leaves on the trees are turning all sorts of attractive shades of yellows, oranges and reds. But its a confusing season in Canberra at the moment.  Daytime temperatures are still pushing over the 20 degree mark every day, its t-shirt weather between eleven and three.  But the nights have turned cold, lows were around ten or so which was mild enough, but in the last week they've dropped to six or so, which is cold enough to be considered actually cold.  As opposed to the cold Australians moan about below about 15. I'm beginning to consider gloves in the mornings now and what with the lack of insulation in pretty much all of Canberra's homes (and no-one has central heating) it might be time to invest in a heater.

Cyclones

So last Wednesday we got the remnants of the previous week's cyclone, in a pretty epic thunderstorm.  Luckily it hit just as we were getting into the cars to go home from the local frisbee league which me and my friends have joined.  Its was pretty fierce, but something which I'm pretty used to in the UK.  We occasionally get the remnants of hurricanes in the UK, the ones which track up the east coast of the states eventually make it to us.  Obviously not hurricanes or hurricane force winds by then (usually takes a week or so) but still a pretty big storm.  I would not have wanted to be in Queensland last week.  And I suspect, given the climatic state, we might not have heard the last of the cyclone season so far.

Anyway, I meant to post this last week, its a comparison of the size of Cyclone Yasi to other parts of the world.  Pretty amazing. It is the entire size of the storm system though, the actual central destructive part is about UK size rather than Europe size (as also shown by the BBC) but that still pretty amazing.  Interestingly enough, most of the rainfall actually came from the stuff behind the cyclone as it came over.  Strange.

http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/floodrelief/how-cyclone-yasi-compares-around-the-world/story-fn7ik2te-1225998762870

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12347702

Brisbane Underwater

This is a news story that has been across the world over the past couple of days so I won't go over the details apart from an interesting fact:

The area of Queensland underwater is bigger than France and Germany, thats a lot of water.

I've had my first scientific paper accepted for publication (subject to a major revision of course), which, as its on the subject of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) now makes me qualified to talk about the flooding on a scientific level.  I went over the fact we're in a La Nina year in a previous post on the rain in Canberra at the start of December and the flooding in Queensland is an extension of that.  Rainfall in Australia should return to normal levels by April.

However I focused on sea surface temperatures, which, as this very interesting article discusses, may not be the whole story: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/42858.html
The strength of a La Nina is typically measured by the sea-surface temperature in the eastern equatorial Pacific which as this page demonstrates (http://ggweather.com/enso/oni.htm), is lower than we've had it for a reasonable but not a long time. However as the planet is warming up the baseline of temperatures is rising. Thus the absolute temperature may not be drastically low, but the anomaly may be larger than it appears as its dropping from a now higher baseline.  Thus it is the ocean pressures (the southern oscillation part of ENSO, typically measured as the air pressure difference between Tahiti and Darwin) which reveal that this year may actually be a big big event, the biggest since 1917 (http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/soihtm1.shtml), as these are recording a much larger anomaly, and help control the actual weather that this climatic phenomenon tends to cause.  This is the kind of thing I find interesting! (Although I feel that those people writing the comments section ought to be shot for stupidity, the article is hardly about global warming, the fact we have a strong La Nina has nothing (probably) to do with the changing climate, its just how we measure it that we're having to adapt (surely proof in itself that the climate is getting hotter if we're having to change how we measure things to cope)  Grrrr!)

Of course its not just Queensland underwater.  The second major story on the news tonight was the floods in Victoria, the third was flooding in Tasmania, and the fourth was flooding in New South Wales.  The floods in Brazil came in about eighth!

Floods

More rain! As the strong La Nina conditions really begin to kick in around the world for the first time since 1982/83 and 1973/4, South-Eastern Australia has been suffering some torrential rains, the worst of which have occurred over the past couple of weeks.  December here in Canberra is usually a pretty dry month, with an average monthly rainfall of 52mm.  We got 73mm on the 2nd of December alone. When its cooler its just persistent, when it gets hotter you get thunderstorms, wave after wave, three or four bands a day (or night) which each drop several mm of water. The dams are full for the first time in a decade.  The drought is well and truly over, so much so that the farmers are losing more crops than they normally do due to a lack of water.  Rainfall records have been tumbling, some absolute records have fallen, its been Australia's wettest spring on record.  Last week people were talking about it being as wet as it was during the previous La Ninas, not necessarily unusal, but then we've had this week on top of it and things have got worse!

On the day with 73mm, the storm drains were at maximum capacity, the Lyneham wetlands site 50m or so where we live was beginning to flood, Sullivan's Creek (really just another storm drain) was running over its banks slightly in places.  See attached photos.  The duck pond on campus had two exits instead of the usual one.  Canberra got off lightly though compared with other places around it.  Its easy to forget but this city is over 600m up (the highest village in England (and possibly the UK) is just 463m, the pub that gets snowed in all the time is at 520m) and so isn't really floodplain territory. Down to the west, in the floodplains things have got really bad. The town of Wagga Wagga especially.

from www.actewagl.com.au

Its felt drier here the last week, we've even had a couple of nice days, but the ground is sodden, and when the rain arrived again in the middle of this week, it caused widespread disaster across New South Wales, incluing Queanbeyan (which is kind of part of Canberra, but kind of not) whose flood waters peaked at +8m overnight.  The town is pretty much split in two and has been declared a natural disaster zone. Tuggeranong (another distant part of Canberra) allegedly received over 100mm yesterday and has topped 400% of its typical December rainfall already. The Queanbeyan sewage works have been flooded too, which means Lake Burley Griffin is out of action due to contamination, so theres been no sailing for the last week.  The dam at the end of the lake has all its flood gates open.  Other ACT dams are overtopping.

Its going to be an above average cyclone season in the North too.

Rainfall should return to normal levels around April sometime!

Going all sciency it looks like the La Nina conditions are actually weakening slightly, in which case the comparisons to be made are to 74/75.  Here's the November SST anomaly map.  That is a very warm anomaly surrounding Australia and thats why its raining so much!



from www.bom.gov.au

from www.bom.gov.au

More weather

At the risk of writing too much about the weather here, it has been awesome today.  Instead of the series of tame drizzly lows that have characterised the last month (its been so wet here recently, the wettest spring for decades probably) its warmed up a bit, now above twenty and the rainy lows have turned into epic thunderstorms. We've had three today, the first at five-thirty in the morning, waking pretty much everyone up.  The other two were this evening and involved some pretty serious cloud-bursts.  I was caught in the final cloudburst of the day cycling home, it was epic, and I was only about two minutes from home.

But I've only got myself to blame. Between the final two storms there was this fantastic light, a dark matt grey sky, with bright clouds where the sun shone between them.  The whole city was in that strange post-thunderstorm orangey glow that looks so awesome, like someone had turned up the brightness of all the colours.  It was really cool, so I stopped to take some photos (although being a camera phone they don't quite do the scene justice) and ended up getting caught by the fast approaching storm, damn!

Rain

So on Friday we had another of those really wet days that seems to occur occasionally in Canberra.  It absolutely bucketed down pretty much all day, the storm drains went wild. I stayed inside working waiting for a break in the rain that didn't come until after three pm.  The Australian weather service runs a very good radar imaging mapping thingy so it was quite good to watch the bands of rain come across this corner of the country.  In some places in New South Wales it was the wettest day for thirty odd years, and the wettest October day for a hundred.  Lots of reports of flooding, and some high winds, which of course means falling branches and trees.  As I've said before, Australia has some seriously weak trees. But apparently the rain never made the coast, got stopped by the coastal ranges, so there you go, fine in Sydney, as usual!

I've included a few pics of the storm drains today, a leaf got stuck on my phone's camera lens so the images aren't great.  These pics are after the storm when I attempted to go home, and the water level in the drains was already doen by six inches or so from its peak when I cycled in, in a gap between bands of rain.  The drains are almost back to normal now, but they seem to take a few days to get right down.  Hopefully I'll include another post in a couple of days of some after pics (or should that be before?).

Anyway, Canberra is going to be very green this spring, its already getting that way.  The impression I'm getting is that its not going to be this way every year.  Its the beginning of a La Nina year (though in my climatologist opinion I'd say the Indian Ocean Dipole is having more of an effect right now) and so may remain fairly wet. Don't go booking any holidays in Queensland in the new year, thats for sure.

Progress

On the housing front its been nice to actually be getting somewhere.  I saw more houses over the weekend and a couple this week.  All of them have been so much better than (all but one of) the ones I saw last weekend. And at reasonable prices this time, hooray, I will be able to eat! Why was the quality so bad last week, its really strange.  But yeah, lots of places I'd be happy to live in and I couple I actually want to!  Now all I have to do is choose between the cosy one with a wood-burning stove and cushions and the like and a dog and a hot-tub or the bright airy one with homebrew, a cool garden, and a Wii.  Its a tough choice!

I thought towards the end of last week that the weather had turned for the better.  Its been a lot warmer during the days, reaching mid teens.  But the thing about Canberra is that, because its not coastal in anyway, there's a big diurnal temperature range, so its still absolutely freezing at night. Plus of course, weather never really turns instantly and we've had some more rain.  But it does feel as if Spring is on the way.  Blossom is out and I even had lunch outside (albeit with my coat on!).  Its now two layer weather!  I've got some good photos of weather related stuff over the last weak. It makes landscape shots more interesting!  All of these are on my commute in and out of ANU, which is a nice way to travel.  I hope I don't have a hideous commute wherever I end up.

And work has been going well too, though I'm remembering how I work, and just how rubbish I am in the afternoons at getting everything done!

I have a pidge! That little hole in my heart has been filled! And a student card (finally) and the like.  Certainly starting to be a bit more settled.  Now if only I could remember people's names!

Rain, rent and relatives

Canberra is a pretty dry city, usually.  What we had on Saturday was a once in a couple of years rainstorm, which lasted pretty much all day.  If we hadn't have had four consecutive days of something similar in the UK a couple of weeks ago after our own particularly dry summer I'd say it was unusual.  Unusual weather for Australia, well maybe just weather as opposed to climate!!! So it rained, and the storm drains had all of a metre of water in them and there was some wind and some trees fell over.  Wuss trees. This morning was back to one of the clear crisp winter mornings that Canberra is meant to be famous for, and it was pretty good.  Its a bit strange being catapulted back into Winter again in early September but in a way its quite nice.  Still can't get over the combination of tropical birds and contemplating gloves! We went for a walk on Saturday afternoon with the adopted family (!), the kids huddled and moaning at the (at worst) blustery weather, the dog (who practically deserves his own post) being mildly confused.

With the adopted family I've kind of been catapulted into a social life, which is no bad thing, its good to talk to people, rather than hiding away in a hostel room which was very nearly my fate!  Went to a dinner party hosted by David Cameron who kept saying far out, in a way that seems very mid-90s but is probably just Australian!  And on Sunday I was introduced to one side of the extended family for a 2-year old's birthday party.  Its been quite surreal but to be fair, I'm pretty thankful for the human interaction at this point!

I've also begun my search for a room in a shared house.  Canberra's housing stock is fairly rubbish.  Most places are pretty poor, and the people and fairly uninspiring.  Some places are all-right but the people aren't great. One place was pretty much a slum with one of the tenants living in a caravan outside the front.  A lot suffer from that Oxford affliction of being a normal sized house with an ill-advised extension on the back adding extra rooms and blocking all light to the rest of the house. There's not much out there at this time of year (houses will become available in about three months or so and the big rush is in February).  If I was willing to up rent from a third of income to a half then there might be stuff out there, but its not exactly the most sensible financial strategy!  I guess it would be too much to find a 57 East Avenue type house again, but its kind of what I'm holding out for.  I've been told there is good stuff out there (other people in the department say they pay similar rent as the places I'm looking at) but that people tend to hang onto it.  So still hopeful and we'll see what the next week brings.

So yeah, thats about it, I've just realised I might have sounded a bit moany in this blog, its actually been good so far!