Tags: Weather. Queensland. Brisbane. Bribie Island. Mackay Flooding.
Its been a while since Bribie has seen any decent worthwhile rain. Some places in SE Queensland haven’t seen a drop of rain in almost 2 months. Ipswich has only received 5.6 mm of rain since Christmas day and most of Bribie hasn’t been much better!
Featured Image(above): Australian map indicating severe below average rain.
While there have been on and off showers over the past week coming in off the ocean, these haven’t really been anything worth writing home about. Most suburbs of Bribie Island haven’t received more than a few millimetres in the last 7 weeks. Leading a lot of people to start thinking are we going into a drought period again like we saw a few years ago?
While Bribie has been turning into a dustbowl, far north of Queensland, Townsville has seen unprecedented flooding. Smashing all-time records since they began. Some places have received over 2 metres(2000mm) of rain.
Its the worst flooding event in Australian recorded history.
Fortunately, because the Townsville area has built-in anti-flood measures, such as dams and so forth, the relative damage to life has been nil, there has been significant property damage.
Two soldiers help rescue an individual in the Townsville floods.
This was caused by a tropical low and monsoon trough which sat stationary over the region for a week. Dumping phenomenal amounts of rain on the area. Some total included over 300 mm in a few hours. Not even the crocodiles could handle it!
A crocodile scrambles to safety, catching his breath
The reason we haven’t seen much rain over Southern Queensland in the last month or so has been because a general pattern of High-pressure systems redeveloping in the Tasman Sea over and over again. High-pressure systems generally bring fine weather and they block the normal flow of low-pressure systems and troughs that bring our storm days and rainy periods as low-pressure systems and high-pressure system reflect each other much like magnets when you face both positives at each other.
As you can see in the image below, there are constant high-pressure systems developing south of Australia and they extend a constant ridge up against the Queensland coast as far north as Rockhampton.
Although we may see on and off showers for the next week, we may see an increase in shower and thunderstorm activity from about Sunday onwards. There is also the possibility of a cyclone forming in the coral sea, which may or may not impact SE Queensland or the Queensland coast. There will be further updates as this occurs.
We will start to see a more normal weather pattern with rain, showers and thunderstorms return to the South Queensland coast by about mid-February. So then our grass will be a little greener on the other side of next week 🙂
Check out Higgins Storm Chasing on Facebook for real-time updates on the weather and the latest weather news.
Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-pressure_area
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-pressure_area
https://www.pbs.org/weta/roughscience/series2/challenges/weather/page8.html