Who knew the reason for drought could be so simple? Forget complex modeling, Palmer indices, and rainfall projections, the reason for drought (at least in Australia) is dirt simple. Time is of the essence!
h/t to WUWT reader Jimmy Haigh for this hilarious gem.
It’s an old Australian joke that daylight savings is a bad thing because it fades the curtains. Usually directed at Queenslanders or West Australians who (sensibly) do not observe daylight saving like the southern states. This is pure ironic satire.
“The interesting thing is that the BOM do acknowledge discontinuities occurred in the temperature record when Daylight Saving was adopted due to observations being made relatively one hour earlier, so the satire has a slight link to reality.” True, and for many years the max temp reported for many locations on the nightly news was wrong, because it was read at 2pm local (3pm DST), It’s read again, and reset, at 9am the next day but too late for the TV bulletins. Not so much of an issue these days as the TV stations have access to near-instantaneous updates, rather than sending a courier for a paper copy. One of this country’s more bizarre procedures is to enter the 9am maximum as the maximum for the previous day, so if that day was mild, and the following one hot, the mildness of the previous day is wiped from the record. Obviously, this doesn’t happen every day, usually the max is the same for much of the year.
I should point out that the 9am maximum read the following day is usually correct for the previous day, especially in DST where the max might be at 5 to 6pm. The practice comes about from having “amateur” weather readers who may only perform 9am and 3pm observations daily. There ARE days however where the max temp is simply wrong, and at stations where there are electronic instruments, this would be known (and maxima are read at midnight at these stations). The 9am max still overrides the previous maximum though.