Asia/Pacific Computer Services - Australia, Surfing, Waves, Oceanography, Shark Attack

Melbourne's coldest and wettest February day on record!

Wild Weather - Thursday 03 February 2004
An intense 150-year freak mid-summer depression - described as a "southern Australia cyclone" - passed over the Victoria-Bass Strait-Tasmania region. It was Melbourne's coldest recorded February day. Other places in the state were colder - it even snowed in the Victorian alps. The maximum temperature was 13.2 Celsius in downtown Melbourne (in stark contrast it reached 36 Celsius two days earlier). Also, moist air sucked in from the southwestern Pacific caused the heaviest February rainfall across Victoria since weather records began in 1855.

Click the image to see a four-step colour infrared animation of the cyclone. This shows the clockwise southern-hemisphere cyclonic airflow, mixing cold Antarctic air with warm, moist Pacific Ocean air.

Bass Strait ocean was like a huge froth-filled washing machine, far too cold and dangerous to try surfing (except for the foolhardy or daring, at those few relatively protected spots like Point Leo or Shoreham inside Western Port Bay and Kerferd Road inside Port Phillip Bay).

Images are Copyright Commonwealth of Australia 2005, Bureau of Meteorology.

A river of smoke more than 25 kilometers wide flowed southeast toward the Tasman Sea from fires burning in the Great Dividing Range Mountains in Victoria, Australia, on December 5, 2006. This image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite shows the smoke crossing Ninety Mile Beach and spreading out over the sea. Fires (red outlines) were detected across a broad area of the mountains between Lake Eildon and the Dartmouth Reservoir.

Fires in Victoria, Australia - 05 December 2006
Here's a somewhat similar image, but in this case the swirl is anticlockwise (the storm above, being a southern cyclonic depression, was swirling clockwise). To quote this NASA Earth Observatory article:

According to news reports, 50 fires—most of them in remote forests and parks—were burning out of control across Victoria in early December, and fire conditions were predicted to worsen in subsequent days.

Across Australia in 2006, fires sprang up before summer was even officially underway. An ongoing drought and high temperatures have created extremely risky conditions for fires in many parts of the country. In late November and early December, satellites captured numerous images of fires in places as far flung as northwestern Australia and Southern Queensland. (See other images in the Natural Hazards: Fires section.) In most of Victoria (among other places in the country), rainfall in the six months preceding the outbreak of these fires was categorized as either at a “severe deficiency” or “lowest on record,” according to maps provided by the Website of the Australian government’s Bureau of Meteorology.

The Bureau’s 22 November seasonal El Niño-Southern Oscillation update indicated that the current El Niño had strengthened throughout November. A strong El Niño could be bad news for firefighters in southeastern Australia. According to the Bureau of Meteorology Website, “El Niño events are associated with an increase in the number of extreme fire-risk days over southeastern Australia, that is, days which are hot, dry and windy.”

In distinct contrast, during late December south-eastern Australia suffered an icy southwesterly blast for several days. On Christmas Day 2006 it was even cold enough for snow to fall in Victoria and Tasmania!