September Scorcher in Melbourne Australia

[tropicana]

Tue Sep 19 2006

Melbourne AUS
AT 3.02pm Tuesday the temperature in Melbourne reached 30.1 degrees Celsius ( 86F) . The date, September 19, 2006, will go down as the earliest day after winter that the mercury topped 30.

The Bureau of Meteorology said there were only four 30-degree September days on record. Meteorologists said it was possible Tuesday's high temperature was due to global warming.

With the heat came wind — and a foretaste of bushfire season. Across the state gusty, hot conditions resulted in the Country Fire Authority attending 206 fires. All but 18 were out by 5pm.

While Melbourne had its fourth hottest September day since records have been kept, the rest of the state experienced temperatures of between 25 and 32 degrees, well above September averages.

After the heat, rain set in Tuesday night as the mercury dropped eight degrees in an hour, to 19.5 degrees at 7pm. The rain was accompanied by strong, gusty winds that lifted roof tiles and sent tree branches crashing.

The State Emergency Service received more than 240 calls for help across the state between 6pm and 10pm. Narre Warren, Emerald, Corio and Rosebud were among the hardest hit areas.
Showers in Melbourne are expected every day until Monday. Despite that, the state is precariously dry after little winter rain.
In Victoria's far north-west, a prescribed burn in the Murray-Sunset National Park, that jumped containment lines at the weekend, came within one kilometre of a wheat farm. About 14,500 hectares were lost by late Tuesday.

Department of Sustainability and Environment incident controller Les Vearing said the unseasonably "extreme" conditions hampered firefighting. "The humidity is about 7 per cent, which means that the air is extremely dry," he said. "It's the sort of thing we get when it's about 40 degrees, and in the middle of summer."

"To have so many fires burning unseasonably early is indicative of how severe the fire season is likely to be," Mr Fountain said.

The heat dashed hopes that Mount Buller ski resort would operate until the end of the week. With the poorest natural snowfall since 1973, management made the decision to close all ski lifts and quit snow-making efforts.
Mount Hotham Skiing Company spokesman Alistair Young said the resort would continue operating until Sunday as planned. The season had been challenging, but it was far from a disaster, he said.

In 2004 skiers and snowboarders at Mount Hotham at one stage had a thick blanket of 2.39 metres of snow. Last year that was reduced to between 1.3 and 1.4 metres. But this year, the maximum natural snow depth was 57 centimetres.

Falls Creek, which has the largest snow-making system in Victoria, has fared better than its competitors and will remain open until the official end of the ski season on October 1.