Month: September 2019

Townsville’s 2019 fire season

Winter is traditionally followed by Spring but not here, and not in the era of climate change. Last week was Winter; this week is the Fire Season.

Perhaps that is a little melodramatic, but it’s justified by the conditions we have experienced recently. The fire season is already well under way, as it usually is by this time of year, and we have had several very smoky days in town but today was exceptional. Late this morning I could hardly see Mount Stuart from the Rising Sun intersection on Charters Towers Rd, so I visited Castle Hill with my camera to see what I could see from there. It wasn’t pretty.

View over Kissing Point to Magnetic Island
Looking over Kissing Point to Magnetic Island

Continue reading “Townsville’s 2019 fire season”

Townsville’s 2019 winter

A look at recent weather observations on the Bureau of Meteorology’s website has corrected my gut feeling that Townsville had another very dry winter. The total for June-July-August was 30 mm so, paltry though it might seem, it was significantly more than the 18 mm median (see averages here). Here is what we’ve had, according to the BoM.

The main reason I was wrong was that less than 1 mm of the total has fallen since the middle of July. Six weeks of clear skies, increasingly hot days (topping out recently in the low 30s) and no rain has left the city looking desiccated, even though people are still rebuilding their homes and lives  after the February floods.

What can we look forward to, then? September is typically our driest month, and October isn’t much better, so no immediate relief is in sight. We might get some useful rain in November but we might also have to wait until Christmas.

It’s not called the Dry Season for nothing!