Rare spring deluge smashes records in dry inland WA
A normally bone-dry pocket of Western Australia has copped more than a quarter of its average annual rainfall in just 24 hours, smashing spring records as heavy rain sweeps the state’s inland.
Leonora, a small mining town in the northern Goldfields around 800km northeast of Perth, recorded 58.8mm in the 24 hours to 9am Monday.
Leonora (pictured) recorded 58.8mm in the 24 hours to 9am Monday. AAP
It was a massive deluge for a place that usually receives less than 10mm across the entire month of September.
It was Leonora’s wettest day in nine years, its wettest September day on record, and the heaviest daily rainfall ever recorded there during spring.
Tropical moisture fed into a slow-moving weather system over WA, allowing heavy falls to linger across parts of the state’s usually dry interior.
Monday morning’s weather charts showed a huge high-pressure system just off the south coast, which pushed a wave of moist air further north and triggered the heavy, continuous falls.
El Nino has also had a hand in the unusual set-up, with higher air pressure over Australia helping keep the system in place.
Weatherzone meteorologist Joel Pippard said the pattern was closely linked to the climate driver.
“The very slow-moving weather pattern over Western Australia, with the relatively stationary trough ‘cradled’ between two areas of high pressure, is associated with El Nino, because higher pressure over Australia is one of the main atmospheric measures of El Nino.”
The drenching came in almost exactly the part of WA tipped to buck a largely dry September outlook.
Seasonal forecasts issued at the start of the month predicted most of Australia would receive below-average rainfall, with an area of eastern WA extending a few hundred kilometres north of the coastline among the exceptions.
Much of the country may be staring down a dry September, but inland WA is not done with the rain yet.
Further falls are expected until at least Thursday, before the system finally begins to change as the high slowly moves east toward the end of the working week.
Perth will miss the inland rain, but the city could still see showers when a cold front reaches the west coast by the weekend.
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