The MacAlba

Winter in New England (that’s the Australian New England) means, typically, days filled with clear, blue skies, and nights of cold, crisp, air and frost. It’s usually quite dry, cold enough for snow, but not wet enough. It wouldn’t be completely unheard of for the overnight minimum to get down to -15 degC (5 degF). We are over 1 km (3400 ft) above sea level after all.

Winter this year, though, has been quite mild - so far. The sun has hardly been seen these past few weeks. It’s been overcast and grey. I’ve had something in the rain gauge each morning to be able to add to the rain chart. Being the last day of June today, it was the day to total up the month’s rainfall. The tally was 82.6 mm (3.2 inches) with something in the gauge on 14 days. That means that June has had almost twice as much rain as the previous 3 months added together. Too bad it’s too cold to promote growth of feed for the neighbour’s sheep and cattle.

This sounded pretty good until I heard that the best (or worst, depending on whether you were flooded or not) was 550 mm (21.6 inches) in the past few days north east of here, at Mullumbimby, on the coast.

New South Wales - drought and flood at the same time.