The Southern Ocean low pressure belt has been active, providing us with mainly overcast skies, showery periods and, at times, strong winds and below-normal maximum temperatures.
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But cloudy skies at night have kept minimum temperatures about four degrees above normal for July in Wangaratta and nearby centres. Rainfall totals to date have reached about 40mm, some 20mm short of the July average. Higher totals have been recorded at Alpine resorts, mainly due to snowfalls. Mount Buller has had more than 150mm so far this month, already above the average.
Southern coastal Victoria and most of Tasmania were blasted by exceptionally strong winds during the six days to last Monday, July 15.
Both Wilsons Promontory and Hogan Island recorded gusts of more than 125km/h for six successive days. The highest gust was 153km/h at Hogan Island last Sunday morning, July 14.
The north-east and Border are lucky to be sheltered from the strong winds from the south-west by the Strathbogie and Warby ranges most of the time. Wangaratta rarely has a wind gust of more than 80km/h.
Rainfall totals to date have reached about 40mm, some 20mm short of the July average. Higher totals have been recorded at Alpine resorts, mainly due to snowfalls.
The west coast of Tasmania and the south coast of Victoria has been saturated by exceptionally heavy rainfalls this week. A few places are approaching one of their wettest winters since the 1950s.
This is a huge contrast to places in out back NSW and Queensland, which is having the worst drought since the period 1898 to 1903.
The current outlook there is alarming - no excessive rainfalls until well into 2021. This may affect our area as well, as I expect not much rain in 2020.
Alice Springs has continued to be warmer than normal each month from February 2017 (which was when the big dry started), when looking at the mean monthly maximum temperatures.
To date, this month is more than two degrees above normal for July and almost the warmest on record.
The 30 successive months with above normal maximum temperatures at Alice Springs is the longest recorded stretch I've seen for an outback town.