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Rain
This is a meme for which I can't find the original reference, but from memory, one accepts the challenge from the person who made it and receives three things to write about, of which one may or may not have any prior knowledge! I believe I'm also supposed to offer three things to anyone else who reads this and wants to do likewise.
St_Aurafina gave me: rain, apples, furniture.
This Sunday is freaking cold and wet, having crawled up to 14^C today and drizzling steadily. This does segue neatly into the first of my assigned random three things to discuss.
Rain is often on my mind, despite being a city dweller. Over the last several decades (he says vaguely), I’ve seen Western Australia's rainfall decrease, until the present heavy June falls for the Perth region are now seen as unusual, i.e. 210.60 mm for the month. Once it happened every winter. Our hopes of cracking even the average rainfall rely on the next two months, because after that we can generally forget about it. Yes, it’ll rain after that, but not enough to matter, not now.
I could carry on about weather stats for quite some time but will spare you, except for some of the most outstanding and scary. For example, everyone’s been carrying on about how wet this June has been in Perth. Yes, it has. It’s most of the total for the year to date, which is 286.20mm. Average is 732, if you’re talking 1994 to 2017. But if you’re tallying the data from 1876, the average is 844, which we haven’t hit for a long time. It peaked in the 1940s, with another lesser peak around 1955 and again in the mid 60s. I can’t be precise there because the chart I’m working from is quite small and fiddly [Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers ]. Since around the mid 70s, rainfall averages have been much, much less.
If you look at the 1940s, the rainfall was much higher over most of the years than it is now. June of 1945 enjoyed 476 mm, for example. If we got that these days, they’d be calling it an inundation. A weather guru mentioned that despite the heavy rain, there has not been flash flooding in WA, which is because the soil was so dry that it has simply soaked up everything. The forecast for the next three months is for drier than usual, so my guess is we will be struggling to make even the newer yearly average.
Afaik, I’ve been correct in what I’ve put here, but I have simplified some of the above because one can seriously go on forever, or at least I can 😊 Especially when I read letters in the paper like the one from some dork who declares that the weather hasn’t changed a bit in his particular little part of paradise and therefore climate change is a myth! This interest is what got me started on writing a series set approx 30 years in the future where things really have got bad enough that Perth is no longer viable.
So that means I try not to bitch about the rain even when I have to dodge it in order to put in this year’s broad beans and spinach, having hopefully shovelled in enough compost etc to improve the local soil. “Bassendean sand” is a thing and well known in local plant nurseries, but I’m hoping it’s well enough saturated now to provide a decent crop.
References: The Water Corps
Perth Bureau of Meteorology
The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery [2005]
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