My dad had been a weather measurer. As kids we had been stood outside and told to observe the smoke coming out of the neighbour’s chimney. If it goes straight up there’s no wind and if the chimney pot blows off that’s a 60 miles per hour wind he said. This was the Beaufort scale.He explained how to measure temperature with a thermometer and to calculate humidity from another thermometer that wore a wet sock on its bulb. These instruments lived in the garden in a slatted white box that he made. Rain was measured in a calibrated tube. There was a wind direction indicator with NSEW letters that he cut out of a copper sheet, but no cock like some people had. The indicator turned round on top of a very high post in the garden that held one end of the wire aerial for his home-made short-wave radio system, the other end was the house chimney.
All jobs were allocated at our house and so the kids had a week about routine for doing the weather at 8 am before going to school. The numbers were carefully written in columns in a note book with the date at the left and the barometer reading at the right. My dad was a school teacher.
I couldn’t see much point in this routine as the notebooks just accumulated in a cupboard. It was something you did though like getting up and going to bed. Much later I summarised and graphed the daily patterns for a few years. Dad was thrilled and made a frame to hold and display this work on the wall, initially at his school and then at home when he had retired. We established the hottest of summer days over those years was 25°C and the coldest night was -4°C. The Gulf Stream worked then. Those wet chilly mornings clutching a pencil in a Yorkshire garden seemed to have some point at last because we had a result.
That background suddenly had a future because I needed to know about Creewah weather. How well would the chestnuts grow, could I grow other things, how often were the sheep likely to get fly strike? Jon Fox had told me that the only important weather things for growing vegetables were frost and rain. Frost defined the start and end of the season and rain how much you could grow in that time. He had intermittent records of both going back 15 years. It turned out that other neighbours had more detailed rainfall records for a similar period and the families at South Bukalong property had been measuring and recording rainfall since 1860. Our other neighbours would ask for those numbers when next they visited.
I couldn’t see much point in this routine as the notebooks just accumulated in a cupboard. It was something you did though like getting up and going to bed. Much later I summarised and graphed the daily patterns for a few years. Dad was thrilled and made a frame to hold and display this work on the wall, initially at his school and then at home when he had retired. We established the hottest of summer days over those years was 25°C and the coldest night was -4°C. The Gulf Stream worked then. Those wet chilly mornings clutching a pencil in a Yorkshire garden seemed to have some point at last because we had a result.
That background suddenly had a future because I needed to know about Creewah weather. How well would the chestnuts grow, could I grow other things, how often were the sheep likely to get fly strike? Jon Fox had told me that the only important weather things for growing vegetables were frost and rain. Frost defined the start and end of the season and rain how much you could grow in that time. He had intermittent records of both going back 15 years. It turned out that other neighbours had more detailed rainfall records for a similar period and the families at South Bukalong property had been measuring and recording rainfall since 1860. Our other neighbours would ask for those numbers when next they visited.
The graph is what the rainfall numbers showed. It was all over the place with Gordon’s generous 40 inches happening in the 1870s, 1890, 1930s and1950s. But there were many very dry times of less than 20 inches. Everybody talked in inches and points even though everybody had a rain gauge that measured mm. This required considerable dexterity at mental arithmetic that was beyond me. Just divide points by 4 and that’s mm I was told. So I guess points are mm multiplied by 4. The imperial measurement system was alive and well in our area even though it officially went 30 years before.
The second graph is in our more familiar millimetres and has my other near neighbour’s Creewah rainfall data added. Even though Creewah is only 30 or so kilometres away from South Bukalong the rainfall here is much higher.
Nobody seemed to collect temperatures, except for the occasional Jon Fox frosts so here was my chance to emulate my late father with my own weather station. I made a Stephenson Screen, copying the picture in my hazy memory, and filled it with a clockwork 1960s, 7-day recording thermo-hydrograph that was government surplus as well as a max-min thermometer so I could check the thermo-hydrograph calibrations. It also got a temperature data logger for if I forgot to read the charts. My dad smiled down.
Doing a fast forward, 5 years later the records showed there was no week in the year when a frost couldn’t happen at Creewah. So you might be enjoying a Christmas pudding in the boiling heat and it might suddenly freeze on your plate as an inversion layer swept down from the Snowy Mountains.
No comments:
Post a Comment