Top End Wet Season 2021-2022

Here's a classic example of the sea breeze comming in to Darwin Airport, lowering the max temp but significantly raising the humidity and DP's.
Earlier the DP's and humidity were rather pleasant, but about now the sweat is pissing out of me compared to an hour ago !

Darwin's Hottest September Day On Record
( Source: Weatherzone )
Darwin just had its hottest September day on record and its hottest day for any month in two years.

A surge of southeasterly winds carrying warm inland air across the western Top End caused temperatures to soar in Darwin on Tuesday.

This burst of abnormal Top End heat was caused by the same large high pressure system that’s currently driving a mass of polar, snow-bearing air across southeastern Australia.

The weather station at Darwin Airport reached 38.0ºC at 1:46pm on Tuesday, which beat its previous September record of 37.7ºC from 1983. This site has records dating back to 1941.

Another weather station at Darwin Post Office, which operated between 1869 and 1962, recorded 38.3ºC in 1892. However, it is well documented that temperature observations taken prior to 1910 are prone to error. Why? Because the instruments used to observe temperature in Australia were not standardised until the early 1900s.

The graph below shows how many months per decade contained temperatures in the top five percent of historical records at Darwin Post Office. As you can see, there were far more in the period prior to 1910.

Darwin Airport’s highest temperature on record was 38.9ºC in October 1982. This is also higher than any temperature reliably measured at the old Darwin Post Office site after 1910. The highest pre-1910 temperature was 40.4ºC in October 1892.

Another sub 20c overnight min, the 28th for the 'dry season'. Quite late in the season and most likely the last until May next year.

So far this month, mins running at 24.0c, which is 1.0c above the long term average. Max is averaging 34.4c, 1.7c above long term.
Without checking, I think we average around 50 sub 20 mins per season.

An interesting read re the developement of storms in the Darwin region.
www.darwinstorms.com/climate/

Steamy pre 'build up' type day

And just like that, the calender ticks over to 1st October, the official start of the 'Wet Season', and the date delivers this for rain and storm deprived Darwinites !

And my heaviest daily tally since 10th April, short and sharp storm before 9.00am. 12.5mm at home, 22mm at the Airport.

The 29.8c recorded at the Airport yesterday was the coolest day since the 4th July ( 29.0c ) and the previous sub 30c to that was on April 4th ( 29.3c )
Sub 30c days in October are as rare as rocking horse poo, yesterdays was only the 3rd this century, the previous ones were a 26.7c in 2016 and the all time low record ( and throughout the Top End ) of 24.7c in 2000.
In total, there have been 21 sub 30c October days since records began in 1941
2021 - 1
2016 - 1
2000 - 1
1996 - 1
1995 - 1
1981 - 1
1980 - 1
1975 - 2
1969 - 1
1958 - 1
1954 - 2
1950 - 2
1947 - 1
1945 - 2
1941 - 3
And as an aside, we have had some torrid overnight temps in the last few days, up around 27/28c. However the dreaded ( for stats nerds) 9.00am reset has kicked in, so atm the last two overnights will be sub 24c.
For those who may not realise, max and min temps are recorded over a 24 hour period 9.00am to 9.00am, so this mornings 27c is not the lowest for the 24 hour period, it will be the 23.9c after 9.00am yesterday morning. Same as the previous day, with the 28c overnight dropping to 23.8c just before 9.00am with the passage of the storm. Curse you 9.00am reset !