Oh, the weather outside is...
- Thread starter Valka D'Ur
- Start date
AdamCrock
Polish Pirate
I am awake !! The weather is bad ! We will boil in our own sewege !!
Forecast for later this week, 43 degrees would be a record, 41 would be 2 degrees hotter than anything we've ever seen in December.
Hot winds blowing in bushfire smoke as well. a fairly close approximation of hell, I'd think.
Hot winds blowing in bushfire smoke as well. a fairly close approximation of hell, I'd think.
All my beautiful snow has MELTED!! 
So much for my white Christmas
So much for my white Christmas
Sunny and high in the 30s 50s today. Typical. Low tonight 18.
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Uh oh... Looks like I may have spoken (whined) too soon... there is snow in the forecast for tonight 
We've got snow! The forecast over the last couple of days has been up and down, but yesterday morning it was for 1-3 inches of snow, plus some ice, over two days. We've gotten about 8 inches so far, with up to 4 more inches expected, and no ice expected. The kids are off school and all other activities have been cancelled, so they are having a great time playing outside. It will all melt by the weekend, but it is fun while it lasts, since we don't have to go anywhere.
The average maximum temperature across Australia, an area roughly the size of the continental United States, was 40.9 degrees on Tuesday, the hottest on record. Then today was this.
https://twitter.com/BOM_au/status/1207128438554783746?s=19
Here specifically, it'll be hotter tomorrow. Over 40 with smoke for the next three days.
I took this yesterday just after the smoke rolled in. It stand my eyes and made it hard to breathe. The fires are 50km and 200km away.
I hate summer even when it's not a smoky death cauldron. This is horrible.
https://twitter.com/BOM_au/status/1207128438554783746?s=19
Here specifically, it'll be hotter tomorrow. Over 40 with smoke for the next three days.
I took this yesterday just after the smoke rolled in. It stand my eyes and made it hard to breathe. The fires are 50km and 200km away.
Spoiler :
I hate summer even when it's not a smoky death cauldron. This is horrible.
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I read "43 degrees" and thought "Australia is using the ridiculous imperial system?".
Then realized it was celsius. How can you even live with such heat? Surely the risk of sunstroke is severe.
Of course it is the antipodes, so for you it is summer. Still, I don't think we ever had over 38 degrees here. Maybe in south Greece it got to 40, but I sort of associated 40 as the barrier between life and death
You guys have "smoke" as a weather event??
That sucks
Not normally but there's record fire levels, these have mostly been going for a month and won't be out for a long time. You can see Canberra near the bottom left, those two fires bring smoke whenever the wind is right. Then the several areas larger than Sydney burning. That's all bushland - ie forested.
The area of forest burnt is unprecedented in New South Wales and they won't be out for a month or two.
I read "43 degrees" and thought "Australia is using the ridiculous imperial system?".
Then realized it was celsius. How can you even live with such heat? Surely the risk of sunstroke is severe.
Of course it is the antipodes, so for you it is summer. Still, I don't think we ever had over 38 degrees here. Maybe in south Greece it got to 40, but I sort of associated 40 as the barrier between life and death
So the actual danger from pure heat is a factor of both temperature and relative humidity. The latter modifies how well sweat actually regulates the body temperature. If the Wet Bulb Temperature (the temperatureof a thermometer under a wet cloth) is too high, around 25 degrees (ie appoaching the body temp of 37), that indicates sweat doesn't work because evaporating water can't cool to temperatures lower than the WBT. Dissipation of body heat stops working.
Healthy people can die in those conditions just sitting still. At areas approaching that point it's recommended that things like outdoors work, and sports, stop.
So for example, 40 with 10% humidity is disgusting but not necessarily dangerous if you're doing regular non-strenuous stuff. 35 degrees with 60% humidity is potentially lethal. You're pretty close to the coast, a lot of moisture about, I'd suspect that anything much above about 37 or 38 would probably be really dangerous there.
Those lethal high humidity extreme heat conditions have happened a bit, mostly around the upper Persian Gulf. When people talk about parts of the world becoming uninhabitable due to intensified global warming driven heat waves, increases in lethal Wet Bulb temperature spread and duration are a big part of why. There's models suggesting big parts of southwest Asia, from the Middle East across to India, face this issue under the more severe global wamring levels.
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Today was pretty much the most disgusting weather I've ever experienced in Sydney. Luckily I was only outside for like 10 minutes at lunch. Usually in 40 C weather it feels like being in an oven, but there's an extra dimension when the air is thick with smoke. And it has been thick with smoke for weeks. It changes every day, and today was one of the worst (you could stare at the dull red sun, which passes for a blood moon), but it's been an unprecedented season so far. In my lifetime there have been individual days where there's smoke, but never day upon day, for weeks on end. And at the beginning of summer.
We're actually a bit "lucky" here. You've got fires nearly halfway around the compass points so anything except a strong sea breeze means smoke, and the superheated inland air still brings smoke.
For us, the megafires are towards the coast to the east, and the continent-spanning mass of record breaking hot air is inland to the west. So we get either extreme heat or smoke, depending on the prevailing wind. It was about 40 today but now a cool change has rolled in for the evening bringing with it the worst smoke we've seen so far. Tomorrow and Saturday, the superheating will be back but the smoke will clear.
Related note: we broke the contient average maximum temperature again yesterday, this time by a full degree to 41.9 being the average maximum across the continent. 72 hours ago the record was 1.6 degrees lower than it is now.
Also, a diagram:
We got a thin sheet of freezing rain earlier this week that was too thin to bother shoveling. Of course now everyone's driveway has a nice thick sheet of ice covering it. Poor package delivery guys delivering all that Christmas cheer... they're gonna be falling on their asses all day... there will be lawsuits 
At least I got a thin layer of white Christmas out of it... I'll take it.
Poor package delivery guys delivering all that Christmas cheer... they're gonna be falling on their asses all day... there will be lawsuits At least I got a thin layer of white Christmas out of it... I'll take it.
Yikes. We get that during forest fire season in BC and Alberta (summer this year was the first time in several years that we did not get it). It's not accompanied by such insanely high temperatures, though.
It's one of the weather terms here, along with rain, snow, sleet, hail, and fog. There have been some mornings in spring/summer/fall when I've looked out the window (which faces west), couldn't see anything, and had to check if it was fog or smoke. Fog means it will dissipate and not be much of a breathing problem for me. Smoke means keep the windows tightly closed and don't even think of going outside because I will not be able to breathe.You guys have "smoke" as a weather event??
That sucks
40C is miserable. Actually, for me 25 is too hot. I can't imagine trying to function in 40+C. The year I moved into my second apartment, we had the hottest September I can ever remember. Temperatures in the 30s just aren't supposed to happen in September. Since my windows faced west, it was like a sauna in my apartment. So I made sure the cats had everything they needed in the kitchen (only room sheltered from the sunlight, where I could put food, water, and a place for them to sleep), and took myself off to the air-conditioned mall. I basically lived on Slurpees for a couple of weeks (completely unhealthy, but when it's hot like that I have no interest in eating).I read "43 degrees" and thought "Australia is using the ridiculous imperial system?".
Then realized it was celsius. How can you even live with such heat? Surely the risk of sunstroke is severe.
Of course it is the antipodes, so for you it is summer. Still, I don't think we ever had over 38 degrees here. Maybe in south Greece it got to 40, but I sort of associated 40 as the barrier between life and death
@Sommerswerd: You want snow? Check out what's happening in British Columbia.
