Hasn't the weather been strange?!

 

Well, obviously you've seen the lake at St Francis Winery like this before --

-- in June or July or August. In winter, yes? But --

But this isn't winter. This is tickling the middle of December, two weeks from the height of the Christmas season. And after a cool, muggy, wet spring, we're now having a wet, stormy -- and intermittently bloody hot -- summer, which is far from what we expected when El Nino was announced, following three La Nina years. 

But ... well, apparently, this is the first time there's been a positive (or is it negative??) Indian Ocean Dipole at the same time. The Indian and Pacific Oceans are both warm (too warm!) at the same time, there's no place for the usual heat exchange to take place -- which is what causes the hot dry, burning conditions of the normal El Nino summer. And according to what I've read lately, no one really knows how this will play out in the real world, in real time.

Can we say "Climate change" yet? So...

As we go into our Christmas shopping, the whole region is on on flood alert! I find myself stretching my memory back over more than fifty years to think of the last time it rained until Christmas, and yes, I do remember this. 

In 1972, the weather settled in and it rained, and rained, and the rained some more. We were living at Glenelg at the time, and I recall slogging to and from school in endless drizzle and occasional downpours, right through the school year, which ended just as the Christmas season began. So, let's immortalize this moment ...

... with a screenshot from the BOM which tells all, and what it doesn't tell is encapsulated here, in the continuing forecast through to December 15:

And there's really no answer to that, is there? So we're just going to settle in and make Christmas preparations. The tree is up, presents are wrapped, 75% of the shopping is done. There's just the menu to arrange, then we're settled in for the season, such as it is. Dave has to work through Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, same as always ... one learns to adapt. And anyway, Christmas is a time for home. 

Just as well, because this isn't the weather to be going anywhere! And as for the tree -- pretty as always. But we might get a new one next year...

Ain't the weather been strange?

Not my images: borrowed from various news sites: Sydney and Brisbane getting hammered. Believe it or not,
SA had it easy by comparison, with coooold, winds, drizzle, gray skies ...

Hasn't the weather been strange?

That's the strapline from a  rather good 1977 Aussie movie called The Last Wave, and -- dangitall, you'd swear it was coming true. The weather is being peculiar. This is not just summer, it's high summer, just a week short of Christmas. It should be wall to wall heat 'n dust right now, and what's happening?

This:

You can see the stream of water-laden air being drawn up from the Southern Ocean, and you can imagine how cold it is when it arrives here. How much water it's dumping on us. Conditions are a lot like July or August, which is, uh, winter. And all this, while the Christmas trees are up and mince pies are being consumed by the gross!

So, naturally, Dave was out in it. Riding. Of course. Proof, you ask? Okay:

Yep. Down to Myonga Reservoir, stop for donuts and coffee with cycling friends, and home to the southern suburbs. All those years in Alaska add up to a "meh" attitude to Aussie weather ... and some great photos along the way.

From here on down, these are Dave's pictures, from the camera phone (or is it phone-camera?), with a little bit of enhancement on the desktop:

The conditions were so odd, the light levels so low, sometimes these photos look like art.I love the way the trees ghost into the low cloud -- and the lone roo in the yellow paddock under storm skies, in the first shot. Beautiful. Kudos to Dave.

If course, most folks would say he's a little nuts, being out there in this weather! They'd have a good point, but then again, when it's fun ...! And it does appear to be fun:

Good on ya, Dave!

In the lull in the storm --

Dave and I couldn't resist heading over to have a look at the sea, in the lull in the storm, and I grabbed the camera on the way out the door. Heading down Beach Road, the view was dramatic before you even reached the Esplanade --

Massive waves crashing at the end of Beach Road.

We parked and stepped out into the teeth of a 30mph wind. You could lean on it, and it was extremely cold -- colder than Jen had expected, since it's actually not cold at all when you're not right on the coast. The waves really were massive:

Huge waves off Adelaide's metropolitan beaches.

 Looking south across Noarlunga Bay, you were impressed by just how these coasts are being hammered:

Noarlunga Bay being pounded yet again. September 2016.

Spume piles up, in some areas right onto the boardwalks ... the sea is breaking at your feet.

And of course, "it's an ill wind," as they say. The surfers are happy. They were still arriving in many places along the shore by the time we'd had enough...

Surfer at Christies Beach

Good for him. Meanwhile, Dave and I were just about to call it, and one of us was growing very cold indeed. Another photographer was on the boardwalk, getting essentially the same photos, and he and Dave traded off, so we all have snapshots of each other to mark the occasion:

Dave and Jen in the lull in the big storm, September 2016.

And by this point, it was time for hot chocolate -- seriously! Fortunately, we were only a matter of minutes from a safehaven:

Beck's Bakehouse

And Beck's Bakehouse has a very nice line in hot chocolate. Notice how bundled-up the other patrons are, in the background of this shot:

Hot chocolate. Life saver.

Delicious. Suitably revived, it was time to head back out into the wind and the chill of the foreshore...

Portrait of the photographer, in the car window. 30mph is blowing out here!

The wild weather is not good for seabirds. Populations nest at the mouth of the Onkaparinga River, and the site is taking a beating. Many gulls have given up and gone inland, where they're roosting with pigeons beside swollen and still-rising creeks. These, below, are toughing it out, but they're swirling around by the thousand, in barely organized chaos:

Silver gulls flocking at the Onkaparinga outfall

 And before anyone relaxes, just take a look into the south, or southwest (below). Uh huh, we're weathering up again. The rain began before we were home, and the local creeks are rising rapidly...

Weathering up again, ready for the next wave of this storm.

That's it for this episode.  I'll sign out with a windblown selfie, in the car, somewhere out there in the arctic wilds!

 The photographer in person.

The fifty year storm

Quite a drama unfolded last afternoon, and on into the night. I was doing art while a "fifty year storm" barreled in off the Southern Ocean, and Dave had been out for a bike ride before it hit. He was home about twenty minutes after the rain began. What we thought of as a torrential downpour was barely the beginning. About 3:45pm, the lights flickered, flickered again, and the power went off. Uh huh. Here we go (photos below are form the media: Bureau of Meteorology, ABC etc. Not my work, guys -- I was tucked up at home, warm and dry!) ...

The storm crossing Brighton Beach ... this was our local beach until just four years ago, when we moved...

...and a wing of the same storm looms over Woomera, faaaar away in the interior.

The big picture, as seen by the the Himawari weather satellite. It's being classified as a cyclone.

A cyclone??? Off the Southern Ocean??? This Does. Not. Happen. Except, apparently now it does. The way we don't get tornadoes here. Not ever. But one was caught on video by a farmer up at Blyth, which is too close to the Clare Valley for comfort. Stuff is happening that no one never saw before.

(Climate change? I know ... many people are in denial, and it's easy to say, "If we lived a thousand year lifespan we'd have seen it before, therefore it's normal." But it ain't so simple. We've been getting "the storm of the decade" every year, twice a year, for some time now. This one is being called the "fifty year" storm ... and soon such events will be commonplace. That is what's abnormal -- not a storm in itself. The frequency of them. Like it or not, things are changing.)

Boiled down to a tale fitting into a thimble, what happened is this:  severe weather (over 100,000 lightning strikes) caused the main power generators to "trip." They scrammed, it took many hours to get 'em back online. Twenty-two power transmission pylons were totaled; the whole state of South Australia blacked out  -- yep, there's hell to pay, that this can happen to so vast an area. The how and why, and what to do about it, will be beaten up for days. Hopefully, something will be done. Soon.

Next day, there's still thousands of homes without power, and the sting in the tail of the storm isn't yet spent . Our power came back on after about five hours in the dark -- we were lucky. Got the central heating on at once, because things got very cold. Today, rain continues to lash; thunder and hail are forecast for this afternoon. Dave and I will run errands in the lull, be back inside when the "fun" starts ... with a good supply of candles, flashlights, batteries and fully-charged mobile devices. Like last night, when he, I and Mike played candlelight poker.  

So let's get this uploaded before anything dramatic happens! This was yesterday's weather map, just as the storm came in:

Thank gods, today's map just looks like a lot of rain. Things are okay in Old Reynella ... and I'm glad to say that the backyard is sheltered enough for the purple flag iris not to have been destroyed. I was out there gardening, weeding, pruning, taking photos, in the gorgeously warm "calm before the storm" -- it was like a summer's morning, and I have the pictures to prove it.

A cyclone, in South Australia?