|
 WA:
A warm night and record-breaking rain
In an unusual day's weather, much of WA slept through an unusually warm May
night while heavy rain caused flooding and broke records in the South West.
A mass of moisture has been drifting southwards down the eastern side
of a trough off the WA coast over the past few days. It was picked up by cold
front today and moved southeastwards, bringing both the moisture and an area
of strong middle-atmosphere uplift over the South West. The east of the state,
away from the cloudmass, basked in warm northerlies giving minimum temperatures
as much as 12C above average.
Katanning and Ongerup had their wettest May day in nearly a century with totals
to 9am of 75.0 and 73.0mm. Most of this fell in a 6 hour period. Dwellingup,
with 69 years of observations, also set a new May record with 107.0mm, all
of which
fell
between
midnight
and 9am.
Mandurah recorded the top fall of 109.8mm, all of which fell in the 12 hours
to 9am. Records at the current site in Mandurah only go back to 2001, but the
previous site at Mandurah Park, a few kilometres away, run from 1889 to 2001.
Today's total
exceeds the previous May record of 100.3 at Mandurah Park. See downpours for
further details of short-duration heavy falls.
A score of locations across the West Gascoyne, Lower West and
Central Wheatbelt recorded between 50 and 110mm for the 24 hours, and, as
the map at right shows, good rains were widespread and have come at just the
right
time for grain growers who are preparing to plant this year's crops.
In and around Perth, the heavy early morning rain flooded 70 homes and kept
60 SES personnel busy dealing with over 100 callouts, mainly for water damage.
Perth Metro recorded 50.4mm to 9am, its heaviest one-day total since June 2002.
In Mandurah there were nearly 30 callouts, mostly for leaking roofs or
water seeping up through the ground floor.
 NSW: Short, heavy
showers on the coast
Clusters of small, very heavy showers moved north along the coast north of
Sydney early this morning, giving some brief but torrential rain along the
coastal fringe. Norah Head on the Central Coast recorded 21.6mm in the 30 minutes
before midnight. | 
