Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Overnight warmth?

I guess someone forgot to tell the Australian Bureau of Meteorology that minimum temperatures generally do not occur overnight:

"Average spring minimum temperatures are also favoured to be warmer than normal across most of the country, with the exception of Queensland's southern half and the northeast half of NSW (see map). The chances of increased overnight warmth (averaged over the coming three months) are between 60 and 80% over most of Australia. Or to put it another way, for every ten years with ocean patterns like the current, about six to eight would be expected to warmer than average in terms of overnight temperatures averaged over spring."

Deep statistical analysis of temperatures to come soon....promise!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jonathan,
On Mon Oct 6 "The Age" newspaper
ran a piece by a senior BOMer
forecasting droughts in Victoria.
Did you see it?
Would apprciate your comment.

Jonathan Lowe said...

no i didn't see it, have you got a link?

Anonymous said...

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/our-hot-dry-future-20081005-4udg.html

Jonathan Lowe said...

simple go here: http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/reg/cli_chg/timeseries.cgi

and look at every state for rainfall patterns in the last 110 years. Do anyone of them have a significant decrease in rainfall? no. Not one. In fact, some even have an increase in rainfall.

Melbourne is signalled out as being below average for 10-12 years in a row. Why mention just melbourne? there are plenty of other places in australia that have had increases in rainfall during the same period.

If global warming is the root cause of decreases in rainfall in Melbourne, than global warming must be a a clever little fella, decreasing rainfall in Melbourne and increasing it everywhere else.

The fact is that Australia's rainfall has not decreased over time and has not decreased of late at all. Melbourne's rainfall has been below par for the past 10 years, but even an anlaysis of Melbourne's temperatures since 1855 clearly shows that there is no decreasing trend. See the graph here:

http://www.gustofhotair.com/melbournerainfall.gif

And for further reading, try here: http://gustofhotair.blogspot.com/2007/01/australias-climate-is-not-changing.html

as well as here:

http://gustofhotair.blogspot.com/2007/10/more-rain-and-no-change-in-drought-and.html