The results of the rainfall from Severe Tropical Cyclone Narelle! We had 102.0mm of rain from Friday 27 March (started about 8am) until the main rain event ended, this is today at 3pm. The great part of this rain event has been that it was steady rain over that period, so soaked in with reduced run off.
Any further rainfall the next few days will be reported when the rain event is fully ended. This is a long post today so make sure you check to the bottom.
The digital gauge significantly under reported the amount of rainfall, so to get another comparision the table now includes the readings from the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) Garden Island gauge [https://www.bom.gov.au/climate/dwo/IDCJDW6046.latest.shtml]. This is several kilometres away, so can also be significantly different at times.
| Date Range | Manual Period | Manual YTD | Digital Period | Digital YTD | BOM Period | BOM YTD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 27Mar to 28Mar 15:00 | 102.0 | 107.6 | 72.7 | 78.9 | 105.2 | 112.4 |
| 27Feb to 26Mar | – | 5.6 | – | 6.2 | – | 7.2 |
| 26Feb | 4.0 | 5.6 | 4.5 | 6.2 | 3.0 | 7.2 |
| 22Feb to 25Feb | – | 1.6 | – | 1.7 | – | 4.2 |
| 20Feb to 21Feb | – | 1.6 | 0.2 | 1.7 | – | 4.2 |
| 11Feb to 19Feb | – | 1.6 | – | 1.5 | – | 4.2 |
| 10Feb | 0.1 | 1.6 | 0.4 | 1.5 | – | 4.2 |
| 27Jan to 09Feb | – | 1.5 | – | 1.1 | – | 4.2 |
| 25Jan to 26Jan | 1.5 | 1.5 | 1.1 | 1.1 | 4.2 | 4.2 |
| 01Jan to 24Jan | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| Date Range | Manual Period | Manual YTD | Digital Period | Digital YTD | BOM Period | BOM YTD |
The rain gauge works by first filling the measuring cylinder (about 26mm maximum), then overflowing into the main body. Until this point in the year, we’ve only had small amounts of rain so the overflow hasn’t been needed. Below are the photographs of the five measurements required for the reading.





Below is the BOM’s final tracking map for Severe Tropical Cyclone Narella, a rare cyclone that impacted three states / territories while still a cyclone.

Although the digital rain gauge wasn’t entirely accurate, the graphs show how steady the rainfall was across the 31 hours.





