Was March our wettest month ever?

By bobreid, 4 April, 2021
Information

According to my weather station we had 605mm of rain in March - an awful lot of rain. It's no wonder the ground is so wet and sodden!

The wettest day was 18 March when we had 260mm, and the highest rain rate was during the magnificent storm on the night of 28 March when we had 49mm in about half an hour, at a rate of 106mm per hour.

I am wondering if our March rainfall is the most we have ever had in a month - it is the most monthly rainfall that I have recorded over the past few years - does anyone have historical records that can confirm this?

So far this year we have had 964mm of rain, compared to a yearly average of about 1300mm.

I first started recording our weather about 8 years ago using a rather rudimentary weather station that I purchased from Jaycar. It worked quite well and I could monitor the weather at any time with a small LCD monitor in the house.  I could also download the weather history for the past few weeks, provided I did it frequently enough before the memory filled up.

This one failed after about four years (plastic deteriorated in the sun and water got into the circuitry causing corrosion), and I replaced it with another Jaycar unit that lasted till late 2020.

The unit that I have now I purchased from Amazon online. It is an Ecowitt brand (Chinese  made) and works quite well. It cost about $160 delivered. As well as having an indoor monitor it is internet enabled which allows me to export the weather to both the Ecowitt website, and internet weather station sites such as Weathercloud. What I really like about it is that I can look at the weather on my phone, ipad or laptop, wherever I have internet access. I can also download historical data and show graphs of weather parameters such as temperature, rainfall, wind etc,  on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. I have attached a screenshot of the past months rainfall and solar radiation as an example. 

Importantly, it has a comprehensive user manual that is well written (in proper English) and easy to understand, and it provides excellent guidance on how to set up the internet function.

I export my weather to a website called Weathercloud.net, and anyone that wants to know what the North Arm Cove weather is like at any time can access it. To find it go into weathercloud.net and click on the Map link at the top, and then scroll to Australia and expand the map until it shows dots for each weather station on the network. If you then find North Arm Cove there is only one dot which is my weather station (called Bob's NAC weather), and clicking on it will open it up and you can look at both current and historical (called Evolution) data for the last day, week and month. You can also bookmark it so you can go straight to it.

This station is a good representation of North Arm Cove weather but where it is located it is sheltered from the southerly and westerly winds so these are a bit lower that actual results.

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