178 years Sydney Melbourne Adelaide rainfall

Any new long term rainfall time series get my attention and the May 2019 paper “Historical extreme rainfall events in southeastern Australia” by Ashcroft, Karoly and Dowdy is online.
I found it interesting that the Sydney and Melbourne charts of annual rainfall both have their wettest 10 year average periods just after WWII as cloud seeding experiments were commencing over SE Australia.
I last blogged re cloud seeding in early 2018 and there are some links there.

9 thoughts on “178 years Sydney Melbourne Adelaide rainfall”

  1. Yes a torrent of tears for sure and I suspect they will be reaching for their hankies long after this election is done & dusted. Watch also for ABC and LeftMedia efforts to glorify Albo similarly to the deification of Ardern that has gone on across the ditch.

  2. Recent ground breaking CS studies using K-feldspar dust, an inexpensive non-polluting natural mineral is more effective than silver iodide. It’s time to revisit CS in dry Australia.

  3. Bearing in mind the frequent media wailing and gnashing of teeth that attends any articles re drought, rain and water. Is some org in this wide brown land looking seriously at cloud seeding?

  4. It appears Karoly is trying to redeem himself so he can jump the other way to keep the money flowing. However, he can not hide his incompetence in statistics with the paper that had to be withdrawn and the junk he wrote about butterflies around the Laverton Vic airfield.

  5. Warwick, I doubt that about seeding causing flooding in your comment above. I suggest it was a push by the Greens who had lots of influence in Tas. Your last link mentions environmental concerns. If you look at Wiki on Cloud Seeding you will find lots about environmental concerns such as the dangers of Silver -Silver Iodide (AgI) is a chemical that has been used with some success although KI would be cheaper. I note CaCl2 has also been used. CaCl2 is deliquescent ie attracts water and becomes a liquid. It is used in cold countries on roads to make snow and ice liquid.
    I have my doubts about feldspar. I would not trust anything written in Nature. The other reference maybe OK but it is only the results of laboratory experiments and assumes that aerosols in the atmosphere help precipitation. I suggest that over the Pacific Ocean and nearby coastlines the only aerosol will be salts from the evaporation of seawater thrown up by wave action. I once was involved with measuring dust fallout at a plant 10s of Km from the coast. 95% of the deposit was from seasalts (mainly NaCl) and only 5% from dust with less than 1% from the emission of the industrial plant. As there were University people involved the EPA had to accept the result and dismiss concerns from environmentalists.

  6. Perth WaterCorporation negative views on cloud seeding. They say quote Perth [ is predominantly flat and therefore generally not conducive to cloud seeding.] There was a topographic feature named the Darling Scarp which has elevated rainfall – when I last looked
    www.watercorporation.com.au/home/faqs/water-supply-and-services/is-cloud-seeding-a-viable-solution-to-perths-water-supply

    Also – Perth Water Corporation seem to have stopped their www pages “Rainfall at Perth Dams” – try googling that. Just so 19th Century to actually measure and record rainfall.

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