Scott T: The Blog
Summer Rain
Posted Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 9:03pm by ScottTagged: water
Really have been neglecting this blog a bit the last few months. Have been meaning to get two different posts up recently, but will instead just combine it into one. Anyway - some of you may have heard that Australia's had a fair bit of rain recently. Queensland in particular has had flooding in the south and a cyclone through the north. Victoria, Northern NSW and Tasmania have also received pretty heavy rain in the last few weeks. SA has hence had a rather large inflow down the river for the last few months which has lead to the removal of the regulator at the entrance to Lake Bonney and it's now above the natural pool level. Photos will be below.
Prior to this, we had a few fairly heavy storms drift over the state two months ago.
This brought quite a bit of rain as well as flooding.
Just looking back through the weather history, December had 95mm; January 99mm; and 82mm so far in February. That totals to 276mm for approximately 2 and a half months. Impressive effort considering the annual average is only around 220mm, with even lower rainfalls in recent years due to drought.
As I mentioned however, all this rain throughout the Murray-Darling catchment has increased flow dramatically. Last Friday, the Murray River had ~92.5GL flow across the border for the day - again, somewhat higher than usual given that around this time last year, the flows were only a few GL (can't find any exact numbers - sorry). Although the high water has caused issues interstate, SA hasn't had much trouble yet. On the other hand, the high water means the regulator to the lake was finally removed!
This, in turn, has allowed the lake to fill back up above and beyond the natural pool level.
That small stump in the second photo is the one I've been focusing on for the last few years (second from the left in my current header picture). Just for comparison purposes, here's a side-by-side of the two extremes.
Keep in mind that the 'full-lake' photo is more than a month old, so the actual lake level is slightly higher again =)