Problem is Melbourne and Victoria doesn’t really do extreme. With a bit of preparation and a well built and maintained house you can pretty much ride out everything Melbourne throws at you without having to get off your iPad The only extreme we do regularly on a world beating scale is fire danger (and most of us just sit grimly on those days waiting for the front to race up Port Phillip Bay on the Doppler).Who here thinks this was an extreme event?
Living in Ferny Creek we have one of the more extreme climates in Victoria (central ranges, alps, and coastal strip can do better) and in all my time of weather watching I reckon we only get an OMG event about once every two to five years. Of course it depends on your threshold, but for me the last one here was probably the December 2016 storm when we got about 70mm in 40 minutes. December 2017 brought some good rain, but it tumbled down pretty much without incident here.
Just picking on Melbourne, we saw the coldest day this early in May since 1970 and wettest May day since 2012 so guess that’s notable, but May just doesn’t do extreme well or often
There is an issue here with how we use models. In the lead up to this low with the main models we had the UK, GFS, EC, ACCESS, CMC and German models (plus a few more if you want to keep looking). Each of these is run at least twice a day so that at least 12 looks a day, and we watched this for about five days so you’ve got 60 different views on what the outcome might be (you can think of the mid point of these as the most likely, then the scatter telling you the full range of what is possible). My gut feeling is that in the end we landed almost right in the middle of the pack. Most of us pretty happy, some a bit surprised or a bit disappointed. My rainfall was about what I expected (55mm), the maxima of 6.7C on Thursday was a bit of a surprise, and I didn’t expect so much graupel of sleet. The winds weren’t as wild as I expected, because the main low in the end stepped further east.
Progs looking showery for the week ahead. Glad to be on this side of the high with Perth looking at a week of 20s or 30s