Saturday, March 6, 2010

Severe Weather Warning

When it rains here, it's a news item. Normally, it's because we need the water, but as per the previous post relating to the one-day floods here, sometimes it's because it's news to us. We keep an eye on the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) Weather Radar, but I'd never seen dark brown 'heavy' rain on it before:
This was preceded by a new noise we'd never seen before like someone chucking large ball bearings on our naturally noisy tin roof. It sounded like that because it was, essentially. Before the rain proper arrived we had the 'golf ball' hail.

Well, OK, it wasn't golf balls, but it was much bigger than I'd ever seen (no news to Bev) so in the interests of precise blogging and my obsessively non-fiction writing nature, here's a shot of a couple of the slightly melted hailstones with coins to measure against. The hail's about the size of a 5c piece (slightly smaller than a Euro 5c, or bigger than a TTC token!) For those in England, the 50c piece is the same size as the British 50p, the 5c about the size of the 5p.

Now awaiting the showers of fish. Blue Grenadier, please.

James

PS - Someone else got the golf ball hail. This photo from the Age.


PPS: And my friend Rob found this mention of showers of fish in the Northern Territory, here. Be careful what you joke about!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You guys okay? I saw that story about the fish!

I have several friends reporting monsoon rains around Darwin. That radar image is very scary.

Taccola said...

We're fine! I haven't seen hail like that for ages, but it seems our suburb got the smaller ones, the golf-balls fell in other parts of the city. It all caused some chaos with collapsed roof sections at the stadium and the train station. Seems no-one was hurt, which is good, but there's a lot of flooding and damage.

Our motto is: when it rains, bake scones! We spent the afternoon snug on the sofas, reading, with a pot of tea, a plate of scones and a happy sleeping dog nearby.