After a long period of drought Sydney finally scored a wetter than average year in 2007. Total rainfall was 1499.2 mm, compared with the annual average of 1215.1 mm, making it the wettest year since 1998.
Geez, we sure didn’t!
This year perhaps?
Nope, in a La Nina phase the Americas get it dry, and the current one is projected to last into 2008.
While 2007 was our wettest year for some time it was also the hottest, so much of that extra rain will have evaporated.
We have a rain gauge in the front yard, courtesy of the Water Board. (We had the yard audited to see if we could reasonably further reduce water use. Short answer: nope).
One night last month we had 100mm of rain. We thought that was impressive.
Even so, the extra rain is a huge positive. The dams are at 60.9%, a vast improvement on the position mid-year when capacity was in the mid 30s.
And it has certainly been a cooler start to summer this year:
Lake Mead, the major water source for Las Vegas and parts of Southern California, has seen its lowest level in years due to low rainfall and low snowfall in Colorado.
It has gotten worse and worse every year since I moved here.
The only good news is that the fact seems to have hit home with locals and the water authority has praised the community for water conservation - using far less than ever in the history of this city (per capita). Even with the growing population, water usage has remained the same low level for several years now.
We’ve all become much more water conscious too. An article in the paper a couple of days ago noted that the people of Sydney are now using less water than in 1974, when the total population was 1.2 million less. The daily use per capita in 1974 was 464 litres. Now it’s 328 litres.
That’s pretty impressive.
When i lived in the Inner West (Erskineville, then Petersham) i used to get really pissed off with people who would use their hoses to “sweep” the sidewalk in front of their house. Not only was it a massive waste of water, but everything they sluiced away, including chip packets and other non-bio-degradable garbage, would be swept into the drains and end up in the ocean.
My parents live outside of Goulburn, and they’ve had some decent rainfall this year. They are reliant on rainfall for all their household water, and so far, even with the long droughts, they’ve never run out. They have four large tanks, and each tank lasts them about 3 months, so when the tanks are all full they have a good year’s water supply.
Only on the east coast, due to the huge stable low pressure off Queensland that’s causing all the big seas. Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne have all had days over 40 degrees already this year.
And last year was the sixth hottest on record in Australia, and the hottest ever in the Murray-Darling Basin, South Australia, NSW and Victoria. So it being a bit cooler than that this year is no surprise.