Brace yourselves, folks: our resident rainman Jim Kennedy has some shocking news.
After the flood, cometh the drought. Well, maybe not quite, but over the first two months of 2023 the heavens opened only enough to offer 18 per cent of last year’s deluge over the same two months.
Says Jim: “Rainfall figures for January and February 2023 are 59mm and 119mm respectively, with the total 178mm. This gives us a measly figure of just 49 per cent against our January/February average rainfall of 365mm. By this time last year we had recorded a staggering 994mm.”
Of course, Jim was predicting a dry ’23 as early as mid-January and the BOM has fallen into line with him in its full climate statement and predictions for the year, saying that La Nina is definitely on the way out with dry times ahead. And a bit of March drizzle hasn’t changed Jim’s thinking either.
Jim, 84, has been monitoring local rainfall for several years now and in 2019 he began charting the fluctuations.
He is at pains to explain that his gauge readings, on the coast at Sunrise Beach, can be different from the official reading upriver a few kilometres at Tewantin, due to local topography, but they tend to average out.
And since Noosa Today first met him two years ago, his predictions based on the evidence of his backyard gauge have been right on the money.
