President’s Column, January 2012: Xmas Day Storm, Melbourne 2011
Mon, Jan 23 2012

The photo above shows my backyard late on Xmas Day afternoon in 2011. The hailstorm is the “best” I have seen in Melbourne in the 60 years I have lived here. It continued for over 10 minutes, with many hailstones close to the legendary “golf ball” size. There was no damage at my house, although I was very worried about the family cars parked in my drive, but elsewhere in western and northern Melbourne there was a lot of damage. Some damage was from the hail (including car sales yards where many cars were parked outside with no cover) or the heavy rains.

The synoptic map for that morning, from the Bureau of Meteorology archive of weather maps (http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/charts/charts.browse.pl), is shown below. The “cause” of the hailstorm, the deep trough lying across Australia, is evident. So it is not surprising that the Bureau predicted the stormy weather that day.

I think it would be great if AMOS could include, on our web pages, features about such exciting recent weather events, including in-depth discussion about their causes and the predictions of such events. These could also be included in BAMOS, to complement Blair Trewin’s continuing series “Charts from the Past”. What we need are volunteers to write such articles. Please let us know if you are interested in contributing such an article, or articles.

What we need are volunteers to write such articles. Please let us know if you are interested in contributing such an article, or articles.

Neville Nicholls