What goes around...

[stephbg]

Seeking advice from people knowledgeable in oceanography, currents, long term weather patterns etc. and/or people who've been alive for more than 30 years.

Comments

[drhoz]

actually, I recall a mention of a roughly thirty year cycle of climate in the South-West, so you may be right. Although it was predicting prolonged drought, not that you'd believe it given the weather this week.

[moonvoice]

We never met the July average for monthly rainfall - so even though it feels ultra-wet; it's still not above average yet, it's just different to what we became acclimatised to over the past few years.

[ariaflame]

Slight problem is that 'average' is based on 134 years worth of data. And given that the rainfall has decreased significantly over recent decades, I don't know that we are ever going to reach 'average' again. Well, eventually there may be enough dry years to bring it down, and if we have the occasional wet one we may reach the average of the time.

[cricketk]

Most rainfall graphs for Perth give you the long term average, the average from the 70's onwards and the average of the 2000's.

Water planning works on 70's onwards averages and there's some discussion about starting to work with numbers from the 2000's onwards only.

[ariaflame]

Ah. I was just going by the information I got from the Water Corporation's Twitter account who said they got it from the BoM 134 year data.

[stephbg]

There we go, a bit of light reading on changes in the Leeuwin Current over the past few decades: http://www.oceanclimatechange.org.au/content/images/uploads/Leeuwin_Current.pdf

There will be a test at the end of term.