Friday 4th October 2013

Today turned out to be a very unproductive day. As Chris was away I had to do the news papers and after this I did ARPANSA. I have been suffering from bad back, neck and chest pain for some weeks now and yesterday I had a bad fall so I hooked myself up to my tens machine to give my shoulder and muscles a good shake for an hour or so. It was very painful but I felt so much better afterwards.

After smoko there was supposed to be a SAR exercise but Justin called in and said it was too cold and windy and so the exercise was called off. That only left a couple of hours till lunch time and then the fire training. Just after lunch there was a real fire alarm in the main power house due to a circuit breaker burning out. This then delayed the fire training. An hour later there was another fire alarm, this time in the red shed. It was a false alarm caused by Trent filling the cinema with theatrical smoke to be used for the fire training, so fire training was delayed again. Finally we had fire training and by then, afterwards it was a bit late in the day to do anything else.

Mawson monthly weather report

During September we recorded the highest wind run (2947 km) and wind speed (194 kph) for the year so far. The month started off with some very cold days but it then became much milder at the start of the second week. We also had the equinox happening on 23 September at 01:44 AM LT. 

Temperatures - at Mawson during September we expect:

• A maximum mean temperature of -14.3°C. The average maximum for the month was -09.3°C. The lowest maximum was –21.3°C and the highest -04.3°C

• A minimum mean temperature of -20.7°C. The average minimum for the month was -16.0°C. The lowest minimum was -29.3°C and the highest -08.9°C.

The coldest temperature for any September day on record at Mawson was -35.8°C on 04/09/1982.

Wind:

• The average daily wind run (the measure of how many kilometres of wind pass the station in 24 hours) was 1188 km per day for the month. This is well above the long term average of 959 km per day.

• The maximum wind gust for September was 194 km/h from the SE recorded on the 8th. The record gust for September is 222 km/h recorded on 17/09/1975.

• Blizzard conditions were recorded on 2 days for the month, with 5.1 expected. A total of 32 blizzards for 2013 so far.

• There were 29 gales compared to 15.7 expected for the month, 30 days of strong wind, with 27.2 the average. 7 days of snowfall were observed, well above the expected average of 4.7 days.

• A Strong Wind day has wind in excess of 41 km/h and a Gale is wind in excess of 63 km/h.

Sunshine:

• We recorded a total of 94.7 hours of sunshine for the month.

• The long term average is 153.0 hours.

Conclusion:

September was much warmer and windier and less sunny than the long term means. Every day of the month we had strong winds and only one day of the month that we didn't experience gale force winds!

We had a total wind run of 35,654.2 km for the month. Total wind run for the year so far is 290,384 km. We only had two blizzards for the month but 7 days of snowfall.

Framnes Mountains

Mt Henderson

David Range