An old fella I know referred to what my area is going through as a Green Drought. It maybe a regular term, but Id never heard it.
Everything sorta looks ok, but tanks and dams are struggling big time.
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We had 8.8mm to 9am, and 26.0mm since
It is when you look across a paddock from a low angle and it appears lush green but the green bits a a long way apart.
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Been around for many years. You can have enough light showers to make enough sparse green grass that paddocks look greenish, but a few mm down it’s still bone dry. Growth is never lush and you can’t feed stock on the faint green smudge.
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18mm yesterday and overnight which is respectable, but it looks like the big soaking today will miss the eastern suburbs almost completely. I was really hoping for 50mm over the two days to genuinly break the drought in a meaningful way, but looks like I’ll be lucky to get half that. Still, it’s still in the top two wettest days I’ve had here in 6 months.
Yeah, I kinda get it. We had a wet spring but a deathly dry summer/autumn even if the weather was mild. In most places there’ll still be enough deep soil moisture to keep things going. You’ll only really notice if you have vulnerable vegetation or continually monitor your tank/reservoir levels.
'‘Green drought’ is not quite an accurate term for me specifically, I’m on a hillside where the soil is shallow, and so it dries out quicker, but the principle makes sense. My property is more sensitive to dry given the topograhy - I’m a bit of a canary in the coal mine. I’ve got mature 50+ year old gums dying, I’ve lost every banksia on the property (admittedly not many), a load of blackwoods and cherry ballarts, and probably half the hakeas. Someone on the neighbourhood facebook was posting the other week asking about why so the hill looks so scabby with dying trees everywhere. Wild theories about new plant diseases etc flying around everywhere. I may have been a little short with them…
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Mate up near Mansfield says quite a lot of mature redgums are dying.
I drove through Benalla a while back from Lima South and and -especially in the kms leading into town - there were lots of dead/dying mature eucs of various species…
Yeah, redgums need to get proper drenched from time to time. That just doesn’t seem to happen enough any more. MY bushland management guru says that this is probably just a long-term shift from forested biomes to more open grasslands. Many of the bigger trees just can’t withstand the longer dry periods in a climate change world. They’ll die, and not be replaced, and the forests will wither.
That low looks like it’s centered around melbourne. Thus it might not be all that wet today with rain mostly to the west of the city.
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Models predicting it stays there today and tonight meaning the status quo to continue for much of today and tonight?
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I’m in Torquay. I am wet.
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Cleared up in south Geelong, at the station headed to the VFL game
ANNOUNCE RANDOM THUNDER!
Where the ■■■■ did the come from?
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Here also
My best guess is the sky.
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No, wait.
That was a truck.
Edit: it coincided with the start of the rain, calm down.
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Going to wake up tomorrow either flooded or with no walls. Maybe both.
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Pouring here in the South East
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mmmm… nice to be in when it’s belting down and dark outside
Just got back from a fortnight in Penang (where everyday was 30 - 35 degC, feeling closer to 40 degC with the humidity).
Fark me, it’s cold… and WET! There I was thinking that Penang would be the wettest place I’d be in June…
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Pretty ordinary at child’s sports training.
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