well 6 days ago it was 14 here and so cold- icy-  wth is that- it is supposed to be 15 here today and so i have movies planned-

I turned off the hot water system at the start of October in anticipation to hot weather returning. I had to turn the hot water system back on because of the coolness outside. Winter really has not gone, and we are over a month passed that end.

Not much for that hot winter allegation. I still shiver at night with the fan blowing and the blanket on. Too hot to leave the fan off. Too cold to leave it on without a blanket. Need the window open, fan on, and blanket on. A week from now, I will probably do away with the blanket, and shut off the hot water system. First rain downpour will indicate the marker when to turn off the hot water.

Bobby. wrote on Oct 4^th, 2018 at 5:12pm:


I would not call Rockhampton a good example of being in the tropics. Perhaps during certain years, it feels like a tropical township. But this year, we have hardly had any rain. I think I woke up yesterday to the sound of moderate rainfall. But, my windows are either open all the time or closed all the time. I figured that September the best time to open the windows. But, a month on, it still feels late Winter-ish.

We did notice the cold this year. The last two years were kind of mild. I had put a prediction that this town would get good rain by mid November. I know September is usually pretty useless for rain. But I will be surprised if drought breaking rain is here before mid November.

Take a look around Rockhampton and you will find that only the eastern/northeastern side of town is tropical. In the space of 15km, you can go from a dry section of town to a rainforest part of town. The apparent annual rainfall difference seems to be 200mm between the suburbs of Frenchville and West Rockhampton. But we still only get 800mm of rainfall per year.

You need to drive north a good 200km, and perhaps more towards Mackay before it feels like the tropics. Back in 2010, we got 1600mm of rainfall for the year. That was the only time (in a long time) that it felt tropical around here.

Yesterday, I was on this facebook page on region discussion. We were talking about the incoming thunderstorm. Gladstone got what looked like a bucketing of rainfall from a heavy storm. We only got the tail end of the storm in Rockhampton. Nothing much. But then we were notified of another storm coming in to directly impact the town. It came in and just did sweet nothin'. I think even the heaviest rainfall only produced 10mm of rain in the 20 minutes. We must have got no more than 2mm of rain.

I hope the weekend is plentiful with the rainfall.

A wild storm was coming in last night. By 5pm, we had the west and southwest section of the sky covered with the cloud that we had some relief from the heat. Rumbling thunder and flashes of lightning for a good few hours. A few spits of rain before I got home before 8pm. Then... nothing. I looked at the rain radar and the history of the rain radar images for every half hour beforehand. The entire storm dissipated from a guaranteed heavy downpour. The storm evolved into a relocation of moderate rain north of Rockhampton (and Parkhurst). We did not even get a millimetre of rain in town.

The thing about Rockhampton is that no matter where it rains in the region, we get the flow of the river rise from tributary rivers flowing into the Fitzroy. So, we won't die of thirst. But it is really irritating to not have sufficient downpours in the year. I think we have passed the lowest on record yearly rainfall record, set back in 2002. But I want to see that we get at least 700mm of rainfall for the year. That would take us to needing 300+mm of rain for the rest of the year. Not likely to happen inside 2 months + 1 week's time.

I have asked some guy on facebook for his rainfall predictions for November 20th. That is my prediction of a heavy rainfall week. He told me that he has not done a study to predict what is happening in a month's time. So, his claims that he has predicted rainfall during rain periods seem to be nothing but retroactive claims. He never seems to back  up his predictions with any long-range forecasts from previous months facebook posts.