NH Spring/SH Fall Thread 2024

And how bad is your spring and summer forecast looking?

summer is over. Very cold lows, and lame low to mid 20's highs in the foreskincast. As usual in SE Aust, one half of the month ALWAYS has to be below fucking avg. Back to being the coldest place in Australia for the latitude then.

Atleast that shithole perfff will still have 30C+. I'm happy for them, infact, so happy that I can't wait to take a dump in the Swan River.

Today marks the autumn equinox – when the Sun appears directly above the equator and day and night are roughly of equal length.
The word 'equinox' comes from the Latin and means 'equal night'.
After the March equinox, the tilt of Earth's axis angles the southern hemisphere further away from the Sun, so days in Australia become shorter than nights.
The shortest day and longest night will occur on the winter solstice, which falls on 21 June this year.

media.bom.gov.au/social/blog/1762/solstices-and-equinoxes-the-reasons-for-the-seasons/

With the very warm February and a stable start to March (no temps below the high 20s in the last 10 days), there’s actually some signs of spring. Seen a couple forsythia starting to bloom and even one small tree with small leaves. Grass is also starting to green up a bit. Overall still looks like winter though, 99% of trees and bushes are still bare.

First 20°C+ high of the year today in Paree

'Winter is coming'...
The cool down in Alice Springs coinciding with the Equinox.

Perth's long frustrating wait for rain
( source: Weatherzone )

As Perth and the southwest corner of Western Australia emerge from their traditional spring, summer, and early autumn dry season, the wait for decent rain is a lot more frustrating than usual.
There are two reasons for the heightened stress levels. The first is that even by local standards, it has been an exceptionally very dry period.
Indeed, Perth is facing the strong likelihood of its driest six-month period in 148 years of records dating back to 1876.

Previously, the driest six-month stretch from October through to the end of March was 37 mm in 1994/95.

But since the start of October 2023 to this Friday, March 22, there has been just 22 mm.

Can the city find another 15 mm by the end of the month to avoid the six-month record? Unfortunately, the short-range and medium-range forecasts suggest that's unlikely.

^^Image: The forecast rain for the seven days leading up to March 28 shows nothing for Perth.

The second main reason why locals in Perth and nearby areas are feeling the lack of rain so acutely right now is that heavy rain has fallen in traditionally dry parts of the state.

As most people would be aware, the Nullarbor recently flooded, with some truly remarkable rain totals.

For example Eyre – a weather station at a bird observatory about 300 km west of the South Australian border on the rugged coastline of the Great Australian Bight – has received a whopping 349.4 mm to date this month, exceeding its annual average rainfall of 315.9 mm within just four days.

Even Kalgoorlie in the state’s parched Goldfields district has had eight rain days with 1 mm or more of rain to date in March, including a day when 50.2 mm fell. Typically, Kalgoorlie sees just 2.8 days with 1 mm or more in March.

The map below shows rain that fell across Australia in the week to Thursday March 21. In many ways it's a week which was typical of recent times: rain in all sorts of places, but nothing for Perth and most of the southwest.

Unfortunately there are no strong signs of significant rainfall in the next two weeks for southwest WA.

A warmer Easter in Melbourne than in Alice Springs