Maleny Weather

A strong 6.3-magnitude earthquake has struck Papua New Guinea with no immediate tsunami warning or reports of damage.
The quake hit around three kilometres off the west coast of the island of New Britain early Monday morning at a depth of 192 kilometres.
PNG sits on the so-called “Pacific Ring of Fire”, a hotspot for seismic activity due to friction between tectonic plates.

At least 127 people were killed and 2,000 are missing after mudslides swept away homes and destroyed roads in northwest China as the nation battled its worst flooding in a decade
The landslides swept mud, houses, cars and other debris into a river running through Gannan prefecture.

An ice island measuring 260 square kilometres broke off from one of Greenland’s two main glaciers, scientists say, the biggest such event in the Arctic in nearly 50 years.

The new ice island, which broke off on Thursday, will enter a remote place called the Nares Strait, about 1,000 kilometres south of the North Pole between Greenland and Canada.

Professor of ocean science and engineering at the University of Delaware, Andreas Muenchow, said he had expected an ice chunk to break off from the Petermann Glacier, one of the two largest remaining ones in Greenland, because it had been growing in size for seven or eight years. But he did not expect it to be so large.

“The freshwater stored in this ice island could keep the Delaware or Hudson Rivers flowing for more than two years,” Professor Muenchow said.

“It could also keep all US public tap water flowing for 120 days.”

He said it was hard to judge whether the event occurred due to global warming because records on the sea water around the glacier have only been kept since 2003.

The first week of July started with a high pressure system entering the Great Australian Bight extending a ridge up the east coast, bringing drier and cooler conditions to the Ranges
Later in the week an upper level trough, from tropical waters, passed over the Ranges leaving 5m of rain in the gauges, just enough to dampen the ground in an otherwise dry week.
The weather pattern changed in the second week with a surface trough moving north into our region with strong south-easterly winds gusting to over 20knots. This episode was quickly followed with successive northwest cloudbands bringing overcast conditions and some isolated rain showers of short duration on to the Ranges
Later in the month a high pressure system over South Australia moved into NSW before clearing out to sea. This synoptic situation brought overcast conditions, strong winds and a promise of a few showers on the Ranges, but Maleny missed out.
Full moon and a change of weather pattern came in the final week with strong NW winds from the Coral Sea bringing daytime temperatures soaring to the mid-twenties and the need to put aside doonas at night.
In the last few days of the month the promise of rain became a reality with 40mm bringing the month’s total to 53mm, representing 61 per cent of the 117 year July average. Although this was the third successive month with below average rainfall the annual amount so far this year is 200mm above the norm.