Perth Storms 21/01/2012 (Pics)

Originally posted by Wrabbit2000
I went to the link showing that last 24hrs activity and I must say I am absolutely stunned. Can I assume it's NOT a normal thing to see virtually nonstop, overlapping and continuous lightening across the ENTIRE CONTINENT of Australia on it's northern 20% or so??

Maybe it's a freak thing about being a giant island of sorts? Or is this really as disturbing a thing as it looks for being new and different?

I'd just gone to check google earth out of curiosity and the full national map cuts off abruptly to the east edge beyond Australia's coast, but what is covered is a west to east track of over 2,500 miles of near continous energy at that high level.

edit on 21-1-2012 by Wrabbit2000 because: (no reason given)

Its actually normal for this time of year believe it or not. Northern Australia is currently in the middle of the Australian Monsoon, which runs from December to March. The interaction between the moist tropical air mass from Asia (monsoon) clashing with the hot dry furnace like air mass of continental Australia that causes it. Just so much energy.

Northern Australia is statistically speaking one of the most lightning active places on earth, so much so that a US science team a few years ago spent a summer in Darwin NT to study the storms. They flew a specially modified USAF plane complete with meteorological measuring instruments into the heart of some of these storms. There was a documentary about it and the pilot said he had flown over storms in Tornado Alley in the US but he had never seen anything like what he was seeing in Northern Australia. He said it was the height the tops of these storms reached that amazed him the most. You cant fly over some of those storms, massive convection on them.

As far as the weather in the rest of Australia goes, yes it has been unusual this summer and the last one, but only if you go on the weather over the last decade or so. Many in Australia have forgotten already that from 2002 until 2009-10 we were crippled by drought. Adelaide almost run out of water at one point but in 2010, the drought broke in a major way. This is the nature of this continent and is why the landscape, flora and fauna is the way it is, just ask my grandma she'll tell you.. A verse from the poem "My Country"

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me!

It can all be explained by a phenomenon in the Pacific, ElNino and LaNina. ElNino brings drought or a general lack of rain and storms to Australia and LaNina brings flooding rains. We have just had two LaNina summers in a row with last summer been a particulaly strong one, but not as strong as 1974 or 1956 LaNina. Both of those years experienced major continent wide flooding over the summer. From 200-2010, there were a number of back to back ElNino years, some of them very strong ones. For info:

LaNina

ElNino