Six weeks ago Australian Met Bureau predicted a dry month for Townsville

Warwick Hughes (h/t Dave Brewer) points out that on Dec 20th the Australian Bureau of Meteorology predicted that the Townsville region had only a 1 in 3 chance of exceeding the average rainfall in January.

Australian Bureau of Meteorology, prediction, Jan 2019 rainfall.

…

How that turned out one month later:

Australian Bureau of Meteorology, January rainfall, 2019.

Or graphed as the rainfall anomaly rather than as the percentage of the mean:

….

Predicting rainfall in Australia is very difficult. It's not that the BoM gets it wrong — it's that they pretend they can do it that matters. Why bother issuing one month forecasts?

Ten days out they were still hopelessly wrong

As Warwick Hughes further notes they also predicted on Jan 17th that February in Townsville would only have a 45% chance of exceeding the average rainfall. The downpour started on Jan 27th. At this point, after one week in February the area has already had over four times the normal rainfall for the whole month.

 REFERENCES

Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Townsville Aero, rainfall data, daily.

Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Current rainfall maps.

 

 

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