There is a lot to get your head around with the weather at the moment.

But here are the answers to five quick questions about the floods.

Very unusual.

The rainfall totals from this event have been staggering. 

From 9am Thursday to 9am Monday three stations recorded over a metre of rain:

- 1637mm at Mount Glorious, QLD 
- 1180mm at Pomona, QLD
- 1094mm at Bracken Ridge 

Brisbane has absolutely smashed its three-day rainfall record with 677mm, by recording over 200mm each day for three days in a row.

Before this week it had never even had two consecutive days over 200mm and had only ever recorded eight in total.

The mean annual rainfall for Brisbane is 1011.5mm and it recorded 741mm in just the four days from 9am Thursday and 9am Monday.

Speaking of records, Weatherzone is reporting Dunoon in NSW recorded the second-highest daily rainfall total in NSW when 775mm fell in just the 24 hours to 9am Monday.

If you are not sick of stats yet, Doon Doon in NSW picked up a whopping 1040mm of rain in just the 48 hours to 9am Tuesday. That is over a metre of rain in just two days.

But it is not just the big totals that have made this rainfall event unusual.

Bofu Yu of Griffith University's School of Engineering and Built Environment and Australian Rivers Institute observed that while the rainfall amount over south-east Queensland from Thursday to Sunday was huge and widespread, the intensity of rain was moderate at around 50mm per hour.

"This is distinct from the 2011 event when rainfall was concentrated in the western part of the Brisbane River Basin with a much higher peak rainfall intensity," Dr Yu said.

The result is the rainfall has been spread far more liberally around the catchment this time and more water is flowing down the small creeks and tributaries, which has a flow-on effect further downstream.

"The peak discharge may not be as high compared to the 2011 flood, but high flows will persist over a much longer period of time," Dr Yu explained.

South-east Queensland and northern NSW are historically flood prone and have certainly flooded before but this event is definitely different from those we have seen in the past.

Attributing any one event to climate change is tricky, especially in the case of rain, which has many contributing factors.

But there is a clear link between a warming atmosphere and its ability to hold more moisture and deliver that moisture in the form of heavy rain.

"With each degree increase in the atmospheric temperatures, air can hold roughly 7 per cent more water vapour that is eventually available to fall as rain," as Nina Ridder, research associate in the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre, explained.

"This means that under future conditions which are likely to be higher than what we have seen in the past.

"Over the past decades we have already seen an increase in the number and intensity of extreme rainfall events and we are expecting this trend to continue into the future."

Another major climatic factor at play at the moment is the La Niña, which the BOM declared last year. It has been busy enhancing the rainfall over Australia all summer.

When La Niña conditions are in place warm tropical waters in the north and strong trade winds from the east encourage moisture onto Australia.

So, when individual weather systems come through it gives them another moisture kick.

David Karoly, Honorary Professor in the University of Melbourne School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, concludes that both climate change and the occurrence of La Niña are likely to have contributed to the increased risk of heavy rainfall in south-east Queensland in the current event.

"The difficult part is to precisely quantify the increase in risk or the contribution to the amount of rainfall, both of which are uncertain," he said.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-01/weather-explainer/100873014

THE WEATHER, as unpredictable as it is, is influenced by GLOBAL WARMING. It would be foolish to ignore this relationship WHICH HAS BEEN STUDIED IN DETAIL by serious scientists. the intensity of floods and droughts can only increase on a global warming planet. 

Peter Dutton has established a crowdfunding campaign to assist flood victims rather than using emergency funding, writes Andrew P Street.

I’VE HAD THE HONOUR of interviewing a lot of people who work in the charity and not-for-profit sector over the years and the one thing that they have all expressed is the desire for their work to become unnecessary.

Charity, they understand, represents an area where compassionate society has failed – failed the homeless, failed children in care, failed people fleeing violence, failed whatever group the charity is providing help to support – and more specifically, serves to illuminate an area in which government has failed. “In an ideal world,” they have all said, “what I do wouldn’t be necessary.”

That brings us neatly to the horrifying flooding currently in Queensland and NSW, where lives have already been lost, properties destroyed and entire regions swamped. It’s a situation that you would think would absolutely necessitate the release of emergency funds by Australia’s Emergency Response Fund, which currently contains $4.7 billion dollars exactly for these sorts of supposedly one-off events.

Or, you know, flood victims could just rely on a GoFundMe by Defence Minister Peter Dutton.

At the time of writing, the Minister’s tone-deaf attempt to rehabilitate his public image ahead of an Election and likely leadership challen… sorry, I mean “entirely sincere and very useful harnessing of private money for public need” had raised over $23K, $15K of which came from a single donor.

Even so, there’s something distinctly off about a flood relief fundraiser coming from the man who notoriously yucked it up with the current and former Prime Ministers about how hilarious it was that people asking for help had “water lapping at [their] door” during an unguarded on-camera moment.

Still, the Minister gave his own fundraiser a hefty $2,500, a generous bequest from a man on over $300K a year.

Unfortunately, the response might be the opposite of what the Government was hoping for. Many donors have used the opportunity to express exactly how impressed they are with the concept of asking the public to chip in for a problem that clearly requires the massive deployment of emergency services in the short term and huge ongoing assistance in the recovery phase.

It’s also focused unwelcome attention on the fact that the aforementioned emergency response money has not been touched. In fact, the Emergency Response Fund has paid out zero dollars so far.

Not even the promised federal bushfire recovery funding appears to have been released, despite the promise having been made over two years ago and reiterated multiple times since, while people in south-eastern NSW continue to couch surf or live in emergency housing.

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/peter-duttons-gofundme-is-coalition-indifference-writ-large,16101

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