Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Meanwhile over in Australia...

While we struggle through 50 degree temperatures in this not very cold January, Australia is also struggling through 50 degrees - only Celsius, in other words really, really hot.
A family friend who moved to Sydney sent this map along while complaining of 109 degree temperatures. PopSci details how the Bureau of Meteorology needed to add two new colors to the heat map. The purple blob in the middle indicates 52-54 Celsius (somewhere between 122 and 125 Fahrenheit.)
They also added a pink color for temperatures above 54, though it does not appear that they needed to use that color. The purple on this map is from one of several climate models and it was not widely expected to get that hot. The record high temperature of 50.7 was set at the Oodnadatta Airport in 1960 and there is no indication yet that record has been broken, however there is limited monitoring* in parts of central Australia. Last night a "cold" front passed through dropping temperatures back into the 30's up north and upper 20's (about 70 degrees at night) in Sydney.

*From the Sydney Morning Herald