“You don’t need me to tell you how much rain we’ve had this year, just look at the news, or for that matter, your gardens”, says our octogenarian unofficial weatherman, Sunshine Beach’s Jim Kennedy, but he’s going to tell us anyway.
“How often have you had to have your lawns mowed? It’s been a wet year any way you look at it.”
Sure has, Jim, but now that the sun is shining again, perhaps we’re ready to hear how bad it was.
“Not only has it been very wet, but when you start to look at the detailed numbers there are a few quite interesting things happening. For instance, our year-to-date rainfall, 1879mm, already exceeds our average annual rainfall by 21 per cent. And our year-to-date figure is double the average for the same period [five months].”
Our weather memory can also play tricks on us. It’s easy to think that it’s been wet since New Year’s Day, but in fact there have been significant dry spells, as Jim’s statistics show.
“Even though we’ve had so much rain it hasn’t been consistent. For March and April the rainfall was really quite low when compared to the monthly average, with just 76 per cent and 57 per cent respectively.”
But we can’t say that about the other three months.
“It simply bucketed down with January 122 per cent of the monthly average,” Jim said.
“But February was by far the wettest with 336 per cent of the monthly average, or 823mm, and May tried hard also with 441 per cent of the average, or 630mm. In fact, combining the February and May downpours we were just 100mm short of our annual rainfall of 1557mm.”
If you’re struggling to compute all of the above, just focus for a second on this – last month we had nearly four and a half times the May average, and that’s when we all started to think, is it ever going to end.
But wait, Jim has more.
“What is really interesting is if we take just two weeks rain out of the five months period, you’re looking at 85 per cent of our year-to-date figure. The two weeks in question are the fourth week in February when we received 670mm and first week in May when the skies dumped a further 405mm.”
Jim said the weather has made a mockery of the idea that we live in the sunshine state, with rain having fallen on more than 70 per cent of the days in the first five months of the year.
“May was particularly damp with rain falling on 21 days. Add to that the cloudy days when rain didn’t fall. Your guess is as good as mine, but I reckon we only had three or maybe four sunny days throughout last month, so no wonder we’re complaining.”
