Weather winter 2010/2011

[Anthony Darby]

Anne, your pond ripples will be due to uneven snow on the ice becoming part of the surface as it thaws and refreezes. My pond - well the one I used to own - never freezes as I have a pump and filter circulating the water. No ice forms on the surface at all, even when the air temperature is -18^oC! Last year the pump failed and a couple of frogs and most of the fish died due to lack of O₂.

[Colin]

martin,  capitals were result of not undoing lock.  no insult intended whatsoever. i don't shout at anyone'
so... unreserved apologies if it caused offence
refraining now from making any further comments , too busy trying to see the best in everything  and trying humbly to understand other types of humour.

[Hoy]

Here it is strong wind and rain at the moment but more last night.
In the mountain some people have been sitting in their cars for more than 20 hours due to strong wind, snow and avalanches. The cars are in the tunnels. It is not as bad as you might imagine, I waited in my car inside a tunnel for 30 hours when a hurricane (or rather the European equivalent) hit some years ago.

[Paul T]

Queensland flooding continues!  Yesterday Toowoomba got hit by flash flooding after torrential rain (wall of water down the main street out of nowhere), Gympie has had it's 5th flood in 3 weeks, south eastern areas of the state are now being affected by rain, where it had been more north and west of there which was affected by the previous flooding.  Reports this morning at 8am on the news that some areas in the south east of the state had had 100mm in the previous hour (!!!!!  ), so that was going to cause massive flash floods as well.  Brisbane (the capital of Queensland) has been being protected from major flooding by the Wyvanhoe dam, which is currently at 140% of capacity..... it basically can't hold any more and Brisbane is being warned that they can expect flooding later today and peaking tomorrow.  These warnings did not take into account the rainfall overnight, and some of the areas above Brisbane in the river system are those that have had the reported 100mm in an hour this morning.  Everything is totally saturated obviously, so any rain runs straight off.  Most places have never seen anything like this before and records are being rewritten all over the place.  Very dramatic, to put it mildly) and I'm glad I'm over 1000km from it.  I feel so sorry for those who are getting repeated flooding, it must just be awful to have to wait for it to recede, just get back into your house again and start the cleanup, then be told there is going to be another one and they need to get out.

[Hoy]

Queensland flooding continues!  Yesterday Toowoomba got hit by flash flooding after torrential rain (wall of water down the main street out of nowhere), Gympie has had it's 5th flood in 3 weeks, south eastern areas of the state are now being affected by rain, where it had been more north and west of there which was affected by the previous flooding.  Reports this morning at 8am on the news that some areas in the south east of the state had had 100mm in the previous hour (!!!!!  ), so that was going to cause massive flash floods as well.  Brisbane (the capital of Queensland) has been being protected from major flooding by the Wyvanhoe dam, which is currently at 140% of capacity..... it basically can't hold any more and Brisbane is being warned that they can expect flooding later today and peaking tomorrow.  These warnings did not take into account the rainfall overnight, and some of the areas above Brisbane in the river system are those that have had the reported 100mm in an hour this morning.  Everything is totally saturated obviously, so any rain runs straight off.  Most places have never seen anything like this before and records are being rewritten all over the place.  Very dramatic, to put it mildly) and I'm glad I'm over 1000km from it.  I feel so sorry for those who are getting repeated flooding, it must just be awful to have to wait for it to recede, just get back into your house again and start the cleanup, then be told there is going to be another one and they need to get out.

Has anybody made contact with Noa?

[Paddy Tobin]

Just listening to news reports of flash flooding in Brisbane, 9 dead and 59 missing.

Paddy

[cohan]

Queensland flooding continues!  Yesterday Toowoomba got hit by flash flooding after torrential rain (wall of water down the main street out of nowhere), Gympie has had it's 5th flood in 3 weeks, south eastern areas of the state are now being affected by rain, where it had been more north and west of there which was affected by the previous flooding.  Reports this morning at 8am on the news that some areas in the south east of the state had had 100mm in the previous hour (!!!!!  ), so that was going to cause massive flash floods as well.  Brisbane (the capital of Queensland) has been being protected from major flooding by the Wyvanhoe dam, which is currently at 140% of capacity..... it basically can't hold any more and Brisbane is being warned that they can expect flooding later today and peaking tomorrow.  These warnings did not take into account the rainfall overnight, and some of the areas above Brisbane in the river system are those that have had the reported 100mm in an hour this morning.  Everything is totally saturated obviously, so any rain runs straight off.  Most places have never seen anything like this before and records are being rewritten all over the place.  Very dramatic, to put it mildly) and I'm glad I'm over 1000km from it.  I feel so sorry for those who are getting repeated flooding, it must just be awful to have to wait for it to recede, just get back into your house again and start the cleanup, then be told there is going to be another one and they need to get out.

some dramatic images on tv last night--floating vehicles knocking down trees etc...

[Paul T]

The flash flooding appearing on the news around the world is from Monday in Toowoomba as far as I know.  Brisbane is expected to have the river peak tomorrow, but it is already at 3m height and still rising (expected to get to 4.5m tomorrow) and expected to impact 30 suburbs at it's peak.  I think that is the number they just mentioned on the news anyway.  Ipswich, west of Brisbane is expecting the peak today, then the water will continue downstream to Brisbane.  Queensland is a total of 1.7million km² and 75% of it is currently natural disaster declared due to flooding.  So the area under disaster declaration is now I think 2 Frances + 1 Germany.  That doesn't include the flooding moving down into the north of New South Wales.  They're also expecting flash flooding today in parts of Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania.... this is a very widespread rain event.

[Stephenb]

For those interested in reasons behind the extreme weather in Australia, you can read more here:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/

In particular, the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) value for December of +27 is the highest December SOI value on record, i.e., an extremely strong La Niña (the opposite to El Nino) event in the Pacific.

The SOI:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/glossary/soi.shtml

[angie]

Had a walk around my garden today and can't believe the amount of damage done to my shrubs, some are surely dead. We are only at the start of January and have a lot of cold weather still to come. I wonder how much damage there will be. I was a bit sad to see that some of the plants looking dead then I watched the news and saw all the flooding, what have I to be sad about, I can dig out these plants and start again but where do you start with all that destruction that these poor people will have.
My heart goes out to these folks  

Angie

[Hoy]

Not as dramatic as the Australian weather but here is a video of the weather in Oslo, Norway during 2010 in 2 min:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGRnpkWDPJM[/youtube]
http://nrkbeta.no/2011/01/10/hele2010/

[Anthony Darby]

That's brilliant!

[mark smyth]

I like it also. I can read and understand a lot of the words including the credits 

[Paddy Tobin]

Hoy,

Very interesting and it has surprised me that there is not that great amount of snow, something I would have expected in Oslo. Do you know who made it or where. Was it in a person's garden or a park? I would find it difficult to dedicate a camera to such a project for a year. Perhaps, it was something like a surveillance camera?

Very interesting! Paddy

[Paddy Tobin]

An amusing effect of the bad weather: I opened a press in the kitchen this morning to find eight 500g bags of coffee. I asked Mary about it and she said that she had been worried that we wouldn't be able to get to the shops when the snow was here and so had stockpiled the coffee. She didn't stockpile anything else. So, now I know what is really important in her life!

Our sons must be more observant as they bought Mary a coffee machine for Christmas. Nice coffee!

Paddy