Winter and whipper snippering

Well winter has more or less come.  It is still quite nice during the day, but getting colder at night and we have had our first fire.  This fireplace really warms up the whole house. When the home owners were here over the summer they did quite a lot of work to the grounds, and chopped down one or two trees that were dropping lots of stuff into the pool. We have the benefit of that now with plenty of firewood on hand for this year, although Peter and some friends chopped down a couple of trees down by the road last year. So firewood is not a problem for us.

  The cooler weather also means the grass is not growing so fast, meaning less mowing. Most of the work is done on a ride on mower, but at the back of the house there is a bank and it is too steep to mow, so Peter does that with a whipper snipper, also known as a weed whacker or weed eater depending on where you live.

 We have a man called Jeff Higgins who is fascinated by weather, and lives in Queensland. A while ago he started posting information on facebook, and he is pretty accurate with his information. He is especially interested in storms, and most of you will know that here in Australia we can get some really vicious thunderstorms, not to mention the cyclones etc Queensland gets from time to time. Anyway, Jeff puts up some wonderful photos, and here are two really good pics.  I have also put up his Facebook page if you want to check it out.

https://www.facebook.com/HigginsStormChasing?fref=nf

And here is his website...its's worth checking out.

Bang! Crash! Boom!

We have had some stormy weather this past week. This is storm season here around Queensland, most years we often get storms in the afternoons and sometimes they hang around for a week or so while the weather patterns waffle around. This week we have had some whoppers, but for some reason, our little house sitting area missed most of them. But on Wednesday night we got rain, it was wonderful to hear the rain, we stood out on the deck watching it coming down in buckets. It didn’t last long, but it was a good heavy shower that lasted maybe 30 minutes or so. The grass loved it.

Well, yesterday it was our turn. Late in the afternoon it started rolling up from the south east. A great wall of grey cloud.

 

Then came the rain and wind.

An hour later is was clear and we had a brilliant sunset.

The weather people in Australia are the Bureau of Meteorology. They have a very good website with radars that show all the weather coming, and it’s easy to see the storms brewing and moving across the country. Considering that generally weather forecasters are berated day and night, I reckon they do a pretty good job and are mostly accurate. And all through the storms, the planes come in, every minute or two and land at the Brisbane airport not far from here...



You can see the massive line of severe storms coming our way. You have to
look hard to see Brisbane City on this map...that is our area....

There is also a Facebook page called Higgins Storm Chasers. I follow them on Facebook if there are storms about too. They have some fabulous pictures sent in by all and sundry who keep up to date with this Facebook page.  Here are one or two of the pics from yesterday from Higgins Facebook page.

 

It's not so easy to see the refracted light in this pic, go to  his Facebook
page and see it....its amazing.

RARE* Rainbow with light refraction! This is only the second time in my life I have witnessed and captured the phenomenon... both times as the sun was setting behind me after a storm!

 How does this occur??? The change in speed that occurs when light passes from one medium to another is responsible for the bending of light, or refraction, that takes place at an interface, in the case water droplets or rain.
 Photo taken north of Canungra SEQLD this afternoon.

 Image © Jeff Higgins

You can see the refracted light better in this shot...amazing?  Yes!

 

 Poor Ellie, the dog here we are caring for is not happy when it is thundering. The storms we get here can be vicious, tropical type storms, with great flashes of forked lightning and massive cracks of thunder. Poor Ellie was sitting on Peters feet, her little heart going nineteen to the dozen. She will often head for the bedroom and hide under the bed.

 Anyway, we have had a couple of beaut storms, with some wonderful rain. Short sharp bursts, but enough to do some good.

You know, lightening is one of the most wonderful things ever created. I had a really bad fright when I was 14, when walking home with my best friend, we were standing on a corner when lightning hit the power lines above us, exploded the transformer beside us and all the power lines fell around us with lines spitting and sparking. The sound of the electrical transformer blowing up is impossible to describe, a boom like a bomb and the blue of the electricity exploding above us. It took me many years to get over that, and get used to storms again.

But I have been really fascinated by lightning, and know it serves a very important function in nature. Check out this video, showing blue lightning, red jets and sprites.

 

The video shows all kinds of lightning, even some from a planes cockpit.

It has taken scientists many years to work out just how lightning works, and they still don't know that much. But what they do know is that the lightning also goes above the clouds. We can't see that, but with satellite's they were able to study storms from above.

And one of the things they have found out is that it is lightning that keeps the electrical field around the earth topped up. For many years they wondered how the magnetic field around the earth kept its power without going flat. It seems to be a bit like a battery, and needs constant topping up. Apparently it is lightning that zaps up to the magnetic field and constantly feeds it electricity. Pretty good eh?