Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Yearly wrap

This year, Canberra received 862.2 millimetres of rain, much more than I expected and out of the range for my longer term predictions. I will point out that there was a change over in stations for the last month of the year, which may have contributed to this - for the first 11 months of the year, the original station that I had based my analysis on showed approximately 100 mm less than the replacement station. In December, this station registered 198.4 mm of rainfall - pretty amazing stuff.

The average temperature for Canberra for 2010 was the coolest it has been for a decade, at 20.2 degrees. This continues the correlation of higher rainfall with lower temperatures, but it was still much more rain than my statistical model would have predicted for such a temperature.

The inflow into Canberra's dams will have to be an estimate, with 160,000 megalitres a reasonable one - it was likely slightly less than that, but I will not know until ACTEWAGL publish their figures.

And I have started tracking the rainfall and inflow for 2011.

Where now for my predictions/model? Well, they have been falsified. As such, I am going to require more observations to see if a new model arises or if the trends that I have observed end or continue.