Tuesday, 7 April 2015

(Anti)cyclone

It has been threatening rain for a couple of days now. 

Local creeks have all flooded so I am staying put for a day or so.



Overnight a low off the east coast of Australia produced a local but intense winds (travelling in a clockwise direction) overnight, dropping 120mm on the farm over a couple of hours. 

In the Northern hemisphere intense wind systems around a low travel anticlockwise - and are called cyclones. In the Southern the winds travel clockwise around a low. A long time ago, a local practice arose of referring to the deep lows that brings hard wet weather from the coast as anti-cyclones - because they behaved differently to those in the Northern Hemisphere. These days the name is reserved by weather forecasters and scientists for cyclones that arise around a High.

Our weather forecasters ignore these for the sensible reason that they hit almost uninhabited land, like my farm. I watch them carefully because they bring twisters, savage lightning, including fire balls and lots of rain.

 The weather phenomena is very local - and seems to hit here with little warning every couple of years.  It is very localized - outside of a couple of kilometers there was only a fraction of the rain - although they got strong winds.

Near to the track to the outside world, a clockwise whirlpool has developed, a mirror of the weather system that created it.





Peter Quinton
Palerang
April 2015


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