Monday, April 4, 2011

Thursday - Showers

So they say. Maybe I'm tempting fate by blogging this but they're forecasting RAIN for THURSDAY - that's like the day after tomorrow.

The better news (sort of)# is that they're forecasting this weather for the next couple of days:

Friday......Early morning shower possible.......Min 9.....Max 22
Saturday....Chance of an evening shower.........Min 7.....Max 25
Sunday......A few showers.........................Min 15....Max 24
Monday......Morning shower........................Min 13....Max 23

Temps in Celsius of course

#The "sort of" is because we're going camping this weekend - with the girls' cub troop.

Now why is this worth blogging, you ask?

Let me point you to an article from today's news:

PERTH'S equal-biggest dam is just 9 per cent full - its lowest level ever - sparking fears of a water shortage after months of record-breaking heat and drought.

After Perth's hottest March in a century, longest period without rain and lowest inflow to dams on record, the Water Corporation said the situation was "dire".

"It's almost getting to the point where we can't rely on our dams for any water," spokesman Ben Jarvis told The Australian.

He said the 138-gigalitre South Dandalup Dam had only 12GL stored, and the similar-sized Serpentine Dam was only 22 per cent full with 31GL - and a lot was unusable "mud and muck" on the bottom. One of the smaller dams, Samson, was completely dry.

"It is dire. There's only so long you can go with almost no rainfall without having to have some cutbacks," Mr Jarvis said.

"We've identified a shortfall of 76 billion litres that needs to met by either inflow into our dams or reductions in consumption, and unfortunately we only had about 13 billion litres in total for the entirety of last winter spread across our 13 dams."

In a normal year, the inflow was about 100GL.

Mr Jarvis said Perth used about 1GL of water a day but the last drop of rain was 62 days ago, when 0.4mm fell.

Bureau of Meteorology statistician John Relf said many records had been smashed.

"The previous driest two-month period for February-March in Perth was 0.8mm back in 1877 and in 1973. Both those years had 0.8mm - so this is the driest in over 130 years," he said.

"It was also the sunniest March in more than 110 years, with 11 hours of sunshine a day compared to the average 9.5 hours, and in the last three months Perth also had its hottest nights on record."


We NEED rain, desperately. So let's all hope that the weather bureau has got it right and that it does rain on Thursday.

[Update]Just heard on the news that there are now 5 southwest towns which are totally reliant on water being trucked in. I've never heard of this happening before.[/Update]

3 comments:

DaddyBear said...

I'll be keeping my fingers crossed for y'all. Droughts are tough on everything and everybody.

Suldog said...

Hope you get the rain you need! If I could, I'd send all of ours that's scheduled for the same day I have ballgames :-)

Old NFO said...

Here's hoping... Having lived in California when they were in the middle of a seven year drought, it wasn't pretty...