We were warned about the impending depression and anyone looking at their wall barometer yesterday would have noticed that it fell sharply all day. In fact over a period of 17 hours it dropped over 30MB to a low of 983.5MB at 05.55. The centre of the depression moved very close to Marlborough just before dawn as the wind dropped for an hour before 06.00 but suddenly the wind gusted to peaks of 30 mph and simultaneously backed from a southeasterly direction to a northerly direction. Over the following hour the temperature dropped 4C (8C to 4C) that, combined with the strong, cool wind gave a significant wind chill so that it felt like -1C. The rainfall for the past twenty-four hours totalled 27.2mm, the wettest daily rainfall since last July and significantly, but briefly, between 03.30 and 04.00 fell at the rate of 30mm/hour.
Just after the readings were taken at 08.00 today a gust of 39mph was noted at 08.04.
Update: Wind now gusting to 41 mph and temperature dropped to 3.1C with wind chill of -2C.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.