Quote:
Originally Posted by RickyMaveety
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Are you in the path of, or near the path of, a particular typhoon??
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No, but we get lots of "summer storms" (yeah, I know, it's spring - seasons are relative
) of a particularly strong variety at times. These ones have been sweeping up from inland, from the south-east, and are very compact with heavy rain, thunder, lightning, gusty wind, and, the bit the warnings point out, hail. Like I say though, they're very localised, in that the "black" bit on the radar might only cover a small area of a few kilometers as it sweep up (with strong but lesser effects diminishing out relatively quickly), but there can be quite a few centres, such that the radar looks like a rainbow-dalmation.
Last year at this time, from our balcony which looks south through west to north-west, we could watch huge lightning and thunder storms sweeping past, several in different areas, and yet not get a spot on top of us. The light show was long-lasting and spectacular. Down at Noosaville and Tewantin, which we can see from the balcony only a couple-to-a-few kilometers away, they'd get bucketted on. Other times, the reverse would occur - we'd get dumped a couple-or-so inches in an hour, and the Tewantin observations would show no rain fell there.
In summer, tropical lows can develop a few hundred kilometers of the coast, threatening to develop into tropical cyclones (though tropical cyclones mostly pass up the top of Australia - this far down the Queensland coast it's a very rare event, at least from vague memory of BoM statistics). They drive heavy rain and seas into the coast (rain didn't stop for about two weeks at Christmas, and the seas on Main Beach were up at about 9', which is very unusual for Main Beach, which is sheltered by headland and faces predominantly north). I think that's what happened in August last year, just before we got here (or perhaps it was a trough come down from the Gulf of Carpentaria) - they got something like 600-700mm of rain (23.5-27.5") in a 24 hour period in this area. When stuff like that happens, it also scours the beaches. In this gallery there are some photos of the results from one day's worth of wave-work by such a system (unexpected, considering the time of the year):
http://www.parknmeter.com/gallery/ma...?g2_itemId=106
http://www.parknmeter.com/gallery/ma...?g2_itemId=108
http://www.parknmeter.com/gallery/ma...?g2_itemId=114
24 hours before those photos, the beach started from the boardwalk just behind that red-orange protection netting you can probably barely see, sloping gently about 50yards down to the usually 2-3' waves waves.
So, tropical cyclones in our particular area are exceedingly rare (I think they talk in decades or centuries - I really should look it up), but there are tropical depressions more often which can bring strong dangerous winds and wild weather (if not "hurricane-force"). I recall them happening a few times when we lived in south-east Queensland in my early teens - hide inside away from windows, then go look at all the ripped-up trees afterwards.
Which belies the fact that it's mostly beautiful. 21C/70F average during mid-winter is not bad, and the summers (starting in spring) are as close to being "tropical" (30C/86F and 80+% humidity) as makes little difference (though it gets proper tropical and "monsoonal" as you get much further up the state's coast).
In other words, the big
sturm und drang storms
usually have little
drang attached to them - they're just...well, fun.
Cheers,
Marc