It's that time of year again

I am not talking about the Christmas season, although we all had a lot of fun choosing presents for Twelve Days of Christmas: An Aviation Gift Guide, but about the start of the cyclone season over the tropical part of Australia. The cyclone season Down Under usually runs from December to April.

To kick off the season we have TC Laurence, currently in the Broome area in the north-western corner of Australia, about 15 degrees latitude south. Broome, which is as far from Sydney as Vancouver is from the Gulf of Mexico or Paris is from Greenland, is the region in Australia most prone to cyclones.

Although tropical cyclones very rarely move as far south as Sydney, the influence of tropical cyclones in the north-east can be felt in the south in the form of heavy rain falls. There's a great map here with the track of all cyclones around Australia for the last hundred years or so.

The aviation weather forecast for the Broome area (Area 69) spells out what tropical cyclone means in graphic details:

OVERVIEW:
 TROPICAL CYCLONE LAURENCE 933HPA NEAR 15.4S 124.2E AT 00Z, MOVING SW
 AT 05 KNOTS [REFER TO SIGMET].
 FREQUENT EMBEDDED THUNDERSTORMS, SEVERE TURBULENCE AND WIDESPREAD
 RAIN WITHIN 120NM OF TC LAURENCE. AREAS OF RAIN WITH OCCASIONAL
 THUNDERSTORMS REMAINDER EAST OF YBRM/PRES. ISOLATED THUNDERSTORMS AND
 SHOWERS REMAINDER.
 
 WIND:
 3000     5000     7000     10000         14000         18500
 VRB/20   VRB/20   VRB/20   VRB/20 PS10   VRB/20 PS04   VRB/20 MS03
 REMARKS: [1] WINDS ALL LEVELS CLOCKWISE AROUND TROPICAL CYCLONE.
          [2] WINDS INCREASING TO 60 KNOTS WITHIN 120NM OF
              TROPICAL CYCLONE INCREASING TO 110 KNOTS TOWARDS TC
 CENTRE.

You will notice of course that winds blow clockwise around a low in the Southern Hemisphere, in opposition to how things are done north of the Equator. Blame my illustrious fellow Frenchman for that.

Interestingly, this is why this weather phenomenon is called a cyclone: a cyclonic air flow is an air flow that rotates in the same direction as the Earth. As the Earth rotates from East to West, the rotation is clockwise when seen from a point above the South Pole, and anti-clockwise when seen from a point above the North Pole. To add to the confusion, cyclones are known as hurricanes in the US and typhoons in Asia.

Depending which of the club aircraft I would choose to fly close enough to the center of TC Laurence, with a headwind of 110kt, I could either hover in the Archer (cruise speed 115kt), or even fly backwards in the Warrior (cruise speed 95kt). Not for long obviously, but a sure way to add my name to the shortlist for the Darwin Awards.

The Redcliffe Automatic Weather Station

Because of the bad weather we’ve been having in South-East Queensland for the major part of the last two months, I got into the habit of checking the latest weather observations reported by the Automatic Weather Station (AWS) at Redcliffe before going flying. In the US, an AWS is known as an AWOS (Automated Weather Observing System).

On a number of occasion the weather observations showed south-easterly winds at 20 or 25 knots, i.e. almost direct crosswinds for our 07/25 runway, way in excess of the 15 knots crosswind limitation for the C152. However, when I arrived at the club, the windsock would usually show a wind somewhere between 10 and 15 knots.


This was all good news obviously since it made the difference between flying and not flying. However, this prompted me to try to find out how the weather measurements were made at Redcliffe, and why there was such a discrepancy in wind speed.

The information is not easy to find, but if you go to the page for a monthly weather report for Redcliffe, you will find this mention:

This Automatic Weather Station (AWS) is located in Talobilla Park, and sources its wind measurements from an anemometer on Redcliffe jetty.

I went to have a look today and found both the AWS and the anemometer. Apologies for the photos being a tad on the dark side, but today was really one of those days. Redcliffe received 60 mm of rains in about three hours. When I walked into the club I could see Tony and Lee hurriedly pulling planes inside the hangar before the thunderstorm hit. That was the first hint that no flying would happen. Then I looked at the weather radar with Mal and lost all hope of flying today, so we spent half an hour booking lessons for the next weeks and discussing the planning of the rest of the training, and my options for the CPL.


Back to the AWS. The anemometer is actually difficult to miss, it sits on top of a tall metal pole right at the end of the Redcliffe Jetty. The height of the pole is about 10 meters, in line with Bureau Specification 2013 on "the siting and exposure of meteorological instruments and observing facilities" which reads:

[...] ideally anemometers should be exposed over level terrain at a standard height of 10 metres above the mean ground level at locations completely free of all obstructions to the air flow.

Both wind speed and wind direction are measured here. Interestingly, there is another wind direction sensor (wind vane) on a shorter pole just a couple of meters away. On top of the pole also sits a UHF antenna similar to a rooftop TV antenna.

Finding the AWS at Talobilla Park was a bit harder. It is actually located inside a fenced enclosure on top of a hill at the back of a baseball pitch and is hidden from view by a curtain of trees.


A side effect of my search for the Redcliffe AWS was to discover the existence of the Redcliffe Leagues Padres Baseball Club. I didn't even know baseball was played in Australia. Around here we prefer to play that variant of baseball that involves a flat bat and week-long games known as cricket. The Padres' newsletter claims they are “the biggest and some would say best baseball club in Queensland”. Unfortunately I do not know how many baseball clubs there are in Queensland so I can't really put this statement into perspective.

Back to our meteorology topic. The AWS itself is your regular little white hut one meter above ground. It measures temperature, dew point temperature, atmospheric pressure, relative humidity and rainfall. I couldn't see any rain gauge though. Maybe there's an opening at the top of the box to let rain in, or maybe rain is measured somewhere else.

There is a pole nearby with two antennas similar to the one at the Redcliffe Jetty. One of the two antennas points in the direction of the jetty, most likely for a point-to-point radio link to transmit wind measurements to the AWS. The other antenna points in a different direction and is probably used for sending the measurement to the Bureau. It seems odd though that the BOM implemented their own wireless communication network while they could simply hook up the AWS to the cell phone network or a land line.

With all this information in mind, the position of the anemometer on the Redcliffe jetty may explain why the reported wind is stronger there than at the aerodrome. The anemometer is about 3 nautical miles to the east-south-east of the aerodrome. When the wind blows from the East or the South-East, it hits the anemometer first, travels over the ground and finally hits the windsock at the aerodrome. As the wind blows over populated area, it is slowed down by friction and by tumbling over buildings, houses, trees and a few small hills.

According to Bob Tait’s CPL Meteorology, surface wind speed drops by one-third over water and two-thirds over land in comparison with the speed of the gradient wind at altitude. This implies that surface wind over land is half of surface wind over water. I do not know if the distance of three miles from the jetty to the aerodrome is sufficient to slow the wind down to what can be called surface wind speed, but the order of magnitude seems about right: when the wind is blowing at 25 knots at the jetty, we get less than 15 knots at the aerodrome, which makes crosswind landings possible yet challenging.

Double Bummer thanks to Crappy Queensland Summer Weather

We’ve been getting pretty crappy weather in the coastal areas of Queensland for the last couple of weeks, and it doesn’t look like things will get better anytime soon. Not only did the weather conspire to shorten our holidays last week, but it will most likely mean the cancellation of my two flying lessons planned for this week.

So if I can’t fly I’ll do the next best thing, blog about flying. And if I get really desperate I’ll resort to going solo to the training area in CAVOK conditions using the flight simulator at home.

About a week ago we left Brisbane on well-deserved holidays to the other side of the tropic, yet still in Queensland. We flew to Mackay in a Jetstar A320 then made our way to Airlie Beach in a Greyhound bus. On December 24th we embarked on Whitsunday Magic, a 113ft three-masted Schooner, for a three-day cruise around the Whitsunday Islands. We had an awesome Christmas Day on Whitehaven Beach followed by a not-less-awesome Christmas lunch onboard. The weather was good, but as you can see on the picture above, clouds were starting to come in.

Boxing Day was really bad, with continuous rain, big waves, and the ship oscillating in pitch pretty badly (I’m sure sea people have a proper name for that). We managed to go snorkelling in the rain in the morning, and I went diving in the afternoon at Cave Coves near Cook Island. As expected, the visibility underwater was bad with low light, but I was happy I could spot a few species of fan coral not found in the (relatively) colder waters near Brisbane. We also saw a few beautiful nudibranchs and flatworms. One good thing was the water temperature at 28 degrees.

On Thursday the rain didn’t stop for the whole day. As my girlfriend’s father would say, Heute regnet es nur einmal, i.e. it only rained once today. We were back onshore in Airlie Beach around lunchtime and later hopped on the Greyhound back to Mackay. The driver chose to screen the movie The Rundown. For some weird reason, the title of the movie was changed in Australia and the UK to Welcome to the Jungle. Suffice to say the only redeeming feature of the movie is a fantastic flying scene over moutains in the Amazonian Jungle in a small high-wing taildragger.


Now, the initial plan was to take a short 10-minute flight on Friday morning from Mackay to Keswick Island and spend two nights at Keswick Island Guest House. When we showed up at Australasian Jet in Mackay we were told that all flights to Keswick Island had been grounded for the last two days, and that today was probably not going to be any different. We still waited a couple of hours in the hope that winds would fall but by about 10AM we had to give up. We decided to shorten our holidays and get back to Brisbane. The pressure chart for that day shows a strong low over the Coral Sea. This low is the east-most point of a monsoon trough whose west-most end is another low off the coast of North-Western Australia that would become tropical cyclone Melanie over the next days.


We could have taken a Jetstar flight leaving in the next hour but $500 per person for a one-way flight is more than I am ready to pay for air travel, however convenient. So we decided instead to take a later Qantas flight for less than half the price. But the bargain came with strings attached. Flight QF2307 is actually flown by a Dash-8 and could be called the Queensland Flying Omnibus. It leaves Cairns at 12:40PM and stops in Townsville, Mackay, Rockhampton and Gladstone before reaching Brisbane at 6:05PM. Needless to say, my better half was a lot less excited than I was at the prospect of spending the next three hours in a turboprop with a fair chance of turbulence and two more landings and take-offs than necessary.


The flight was one hour late in Mackay and we had to perform the infamous “dash for the dash” under the rain to board the plane. The runway was wet as we took off. The flight to Rocky turned out to be very smooth, cruising at 17,000 ft between two layers of clouds. I had a window set with a great view of the right engine and landing gear, which would have turned into a rather spectacular and dangerous vantage point if the right landing gear had collapsed like in this recent SAS flight. A very good write-up was written by Sam of Blogging at FL250, who is himself a former Dash-8 pilot.

We refuelled in Rocky and then took off again for the 25-minute leg to Gladstone, and after that it was off to Brisbane. We arrived from the north-west, flew abeam Redcliffe on our left, then followed the shore of Bramble Bay and finally landed on Runway 14.

Since we came back last Friday I’ve been keeping an eye on the weather forecast. And it does not look good for flying tomorrow Wednesday and on Friday. The low over the Coral Sea that shortened our holidays is still there and produces rain and strong south-easterly winds in Redcliffe. Remember, winds blow clockwise around a low pressure area in the Southern Hemisphere.

Today the weather observation in Redcliffe gives SSE winds of 25-30 knots gusting at 35. Given that the runway orientation is 07-25, this means almost a direct crosswind. The maximum crosswind component for the 152 is 15 knots, to say nothing of my own ability to deal with crosswinds, so that in itself means no flying tomorrow.

If that was not enough, the forecast for Area 40 reads:

STRONG TO GALE FORCE WINDS IN THE LOWER LEVELS SEA, COAST AND ADJACENT RANGES, WITH ISOLATED SEVERE TURBULENCE.

and the visibility in showers is forecasted at 3000m and 4000m in drizzle. That’s not even VMC which requires at least 5000m visibility below 10000ft.

So that’s probably a no-go for tomorrow. My hope for Friday is that, with the wind as forecasted at 20 knots from the east, the crosswind component will be acceptable. On the other hand, heavy rain is forecasted too, which means we may have to part with VMC.

Fingers crossed that I can fly at least once this week, otherwise I will have time to perform an upgrade on my home PC (the first one in four years) to bring it to an acceptable level to run X-Plane. More on flightsims in future posts hopefully.