Crikey it’s wet

[spacesailor]

NZ ,Had the heaviest ' frost in the world ' .

That's a Record . 

Gale force winds , ' pushed a new ferry ( the  TV Wihne ) backwards onto rocks & sank it 1968 .

That's a strong wind .

I left , & came to 'Warm & sunny Australia .

spacesailor

[nomadpete]

1 hour ago, spacesailor said:

I left , & came to 'Warm & sunny Australia .

spacesailor

I left sunny Australia and came to Tasmania to get away from the heat.

[facthunter]

How did you get accepted?  Nev

[onetrack]

Most of the people I know who moved to Tasmania, did so, because of the cheap housing and cheap land (as compared to the Mainland city regions).

 

My mother came from a tiny coal-mining village named Lochore (or Lochoar), just North of Dunfermline, Scotland. She said a favourite quip of her brother was, "Summer was on a Wednesday last year, wasn't it?".

[Marty_d]

7 hours ago, facthunter said:

How did you get accepted?  Nev

He's on probation.

[pmccarthy]

He's hoping to get ahead.

[Marty_d]

But seriously Peter has been a fantastic help with my instrument wiring and other aspects of the build.

I'm more than happy to support his application for residency.

[onetrack]

I hope he didn't arrive uninvited, by boat? - that's enough reason to reject his residency application!

[nomadpete]

I had to work hard to get a sponsor for residency

[old man emu]

Not much chance of getting wet where I live, but the wind is driving me crazy.

 

I wake up just on sunrise and at that time the leaves on the trees are motionless. However within ten minutes they start to move as the wind picks up. And it keeps picking up until mid-morning when it reaches a steady state, probably of about 20 kph (10 kts). It doesn't sound like a gale, but it makes it uncomfortable to be outside simply through having this force applied to the body. And although the shade temperature is a pretty comfortable mid-20s, out in the open the wind chill factor makes the apparent temperature much less, requiring the wearing of a jumper. This wind keeps up right until the sun drops below the horizon, when the wind either calms or might drop to a gentle zephyr.

 

And why are we getting such high wind speeds? I note that the other night the wind at Camden gusted up to 98 kpH at 3:00 am, obviously with the passing of a front. But that is an unusually high speed.

[facthunter]

Isobars close together and you have a higher wind gradient. Thermal convective mixing helps also during the day to keep the windspeed up lower down.  Nev

[old man emu]

3 minutes ago, facthunter said:

Isobars close together and you have a higher wind gradient.

I agree with that, but have a look at today's MSL pressure map. 1024 over Melbourn and 1016 over the Tweed River. That's a pretty wide spread. In winter that would forecast clear skies and frosts. However, yesterday afternoon it seemed to me that the sky was a deeper blue, not the washed out blue-grey of summer. I guessed that the upper air was a lot colder than normal.

 

[onetrack]

Inland areas that are relatively flat always get horizontal convective winds as the interior land areas heat up. You notice it particularly in the warmer months, October to April.

In the W.A. Goldfields regions, it's especially noticeable. You get up before sunrise and it's beautifully still.

As soon as the sun rises, the wind starts to pick up, and by around 8:30-9:00AM, it's a steady wind, often around 25-30kmh, and it keeps up until mid-afternoon, when it starts to ease.

Then the "sea breeze" often comes in by late afternoon, as the airflow reverses as the interior land areas starts to cool. Depending on the individual days, the sea breeze can be strong, weak, very early, or very late.

[red750]

Around my area, winds seem to pick up when I rake up a pile of leaves.

[old man emu]

1 hour ago, red750 said:

Around my area, winds seem to pick up when I rake up a pile of leaves.

Try folding a tarp.

[facthunter]

Semi permanent highs happen over large land masses. In a high the air descends trapping smog near the ground where it exists in some localities like Europe. It also tends to be stable and the descending air is cooler  and drier. It's a fair distance from Melbourne to the tweed area. Nev

[willedoo]

It's a dry year here. Total rainfall for the year so far is 21 inches, in the context of a 60 inch average rainfall area. In the 35 years I've been here, 2009 was the driest at 32 inches, so there needs to be eleven inches in the next seven weeks to equal that. Four inches fell in February, so the rest of the year is 17 inches so far.

 

Twenty inches for a year is a lot more sustainable in the harder country west of here. On the coast here, it's very soft country and the vegetation has adapted to a high rainfall, so you get die back a lot sooner than in harder country. Three months without rain here is the equivalent to five or six months dry west of the range.

[onetrack]

Willie, I've never figured out exactly where you're located?

[Jerry_Atrick]

East of the area, 

11 hours ago, willedoo said:

west of here.

 

[willedoo]

9 hours ago, onetrack said:

Willie, I've never figured out exactly where you're located?

Sunshine Coast - but a bit too much sunshine lately.

[spacesailor]

It's the fault of governments, Not recycling ' greywater ' .

I put a hose onto our washing machine each time it's used . to keep our garden wet ish .

Much better than it going down the sewer pipes .

spacesailor

[old man emu]

The difference to a garden between rainwater and tap water is interesting. I have been watering a patch of lawn for a couple of months by hose. It's water from an underground source and quite good drinking water. Several times I've forgotten to turn off the tap and have flooded the patch. The next day the ground looks dry, as if it had never received a drop. The other day we got a massive downpour. I don't know how much because I don't have a gauge, but a bloke up the road got an inch (25 mm)so I got about the same. Now it's three or four days later and the ground still is damp. It can't be the temperature because that has been fairly constant for weeks.

[Marty_d]

Water is water OME.   It's the quantity that's got your ground damp, not the quality.  When leaving your hose on you're watering a smallish area, so the water can seep away not only downwards but also through the surrounding dry ground.   

but if you get a good downpour it's filling the ground to capacity everywhere,  so it'll take longer to dry out. 

That's my opinion anyway. 

[old man emu]

4 minutes ago, Marty_d said:

That's my opinion anyway. 

Acceptable. 

 

You have to remember what that rainfall measurement means. 1 mm of rainfall equals 1 litre of water over an area of one square metre. That's an incredible amount of water.

 

As I look out over the surrounding paddocks, I'm amazed at how quickly the plants recover. Last week there wasn't a hint of green to be seen, but today there is a green tinge everywhere.

 

Why is rainwater always better than tap water? This is my theory:

The rain I got this week was from a pretty severe thunderstorm system. Since thunder is the sound of the high voltage electrical discharge we call lightning. There is also heat associated with lightning. Within the atmosphere, oxygen and nitrogen are heated by the lightning and combine to form nitrogenous compounds which fall to the ground in solution with the rainwater. On the ground, the nitrogenous compounds are taken up by plants and are converted to the proteins the plant needs to grow. One of the first proteins would be chlorophyll, which is green. More chlorophyll, greener plants. More chlorophyll means more photosynthesis, which means more growth.

 

Tap water, apart from the chemicals we add for water safety reasons, and water from underground sources has had the nitrogenous compounds removed by leaching before it enters the system. So it can only prevent dehydration, not promote growth.

 

[onetrack]

Most underground water is laden with mineralisation, which makes for "hard water", even if it does taste acceptable to drink.

 

Hard, mineralised water is undesirable for watering plants. The mineralisation can affect plant nutrient uptake.

 

Trace minerals can have a major impact on plant nourishment - beneficial or adverse. It took decades for W.A. ag scientists to discover that W.A.'s sandy soils in the Wheatbelt were mineral deficient, and this led to poor cropping results and an early belief that the "light" sandy soils were utterly useless for farming - thus meaning they were passed over for development in the late 1800's and early 1900's.

 

However, when it was discovered that an addition of minute amounts of certain "trace" elements to fertilisers made the light sandy soils just as productive as the heavier clay soils - agriculture in W.A. benefited multiple times over. Some of the lighter sandy soils now outyield the heavier clay soils in low-rainfall years.

 

I've recently tried a foliar trace element spray (Boron and Zinc, in separate sprays) on my Mango tree to prevent early fruit drop. It seems to be working quite well at this stage.

 

Edited November 11, 2023 by onetrack