in: blairtrewin; blairtrewin > 2007-12-21;
| # Posted 2007-12-23 04:23:38 | |
| TheInvisibleLog: | Was watching models all week in the lead up. It was interesting to a naive observer how the rainfall event seemed to shift between Thursday and Saturday and in between until a couple of days before hand when everything pointed to Friday. We had 52 mm in Maiden Gully, which is the highest daily rainfall in my memory (going back 15 years). Most amazingly, half that fell in the last 25 minutes of the rainfall event. The resulting flooding was good to see unless you were living in a drainage line. At one stage I think Bendigo had the highest rainfall observation for the state.... until the storm reached Redesdale. That is a quite a novelty for us. |
| # Posted 2007-12-23 05:25:34 | |
| blairtrewin: | Which ones do you use? As you'd expect, we have access to a wider range of models than get to the outside world - in particular, we get the ECMWF rainfall fields, which are probably the most reliable ones around at 2-7 days range. (You can get them indirectly now because they're one of the inputs into the forecast rainfall maps on the Water and the Land site).
On Friday I was largely using the 3-hourly fields from MESOLAPS (the 10km resolution local model). My experience is that at short range (less than 1 day), it is usually good for the timing of the heaviest rain, as it was on Friday, but overdoes the peak amounts. |
| # Posted 2007-12-23 06:06:50 | |
| TheInvisibleLog: | I'll take advice on where to go here. The easiest for a week out for me are the GFS and GASP? Also LAPS and MESOLAPS for earlier. I sometimes go to one of a European model site that gives an ECMWF output, but it don't have rain fall fields.
Tell me where to go! |
| # Posted 2007-12-24 15:38:48 | |
| blairtrewin: | At multi-day range the EC is streets ahead of anyone else. GFS is better than GASP, which is notorious for overdeveloping systems (especially continental heat lows) in the later days of its run.
I don't know of any public site that offers ECMWF precipitation fields, but it's a major contributor to the rainfall maps on the WATL part of the Bureau site (www.bom.gov.au/watl). I think the WATL output (which effectively combines a range of models according to their historical skill) is probably the best rainfall product publicly available, as long as one realises that it smooths out a lot of local variation, especially in thunderstorm-type situations. Enjoy the nice conditions while they last - you're probably looking at several days of high 30s in Bendigo. We'll get the odd seabreeze in Melbourne (and I won't care because I'll be in northern Tasmania, where Devonport's all-time record high is only 31 or thereabouts, because northerlies there come straight off the ocean and there's nowhere else for hot air to come from - a point lost on the Devonport council and/or local MPs when they whinge to us every couple of years about how our allegedly unrepresentative temperature readings are scaring tourists away). |
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