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Pinnacle Weather

Current weather

Useful Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) websites for the Canberra region include:

latest observations radar satellite images

The closest BoM automatic weather station to the Pinnacle reporting observations is at the Canberra Airport, which is 15 km away and can have quite different weather to The Pinnacle.

In recent years a number of amateur weather stations that report at frequent intervals to web sites have sprung up. One of the portals for these is Weather Underground and there are several stations within 2 or 3 km of the Reserve, as shown on the map below. Clicking on the map image below will take you to a live version showing the current temperature and wind direction at each of those sites. Clicking on any of them will enable access to current weather conditions (temperature, rainfall, windspeed, etc) as well as weather history at that site.

 

Note that to show data in metric units you need to go to the menu "hamburger" icon on the right hand side of any Weather Underground page, select "settings" and then select °C.

Caution: Reliable weather measurements require certain standards for both the instruments used and their siting and maintenance. The Weather Underground stations do not generally meet the stringent requirements of BoM stations and therefore provide variable accuracy. Nevertheless they can provide a useful guide to our local weather conditions that may be more accurate than those from the BoM Canberra Airport station because they represent local conditions rather than those at the airport.

When taken together they may provide a better guide than any one Weather Underground station by itself. The consistency of the temperature across all the sites at the time the map above was captured gives confidence that the temperature was close to 18 degrees near The Pinnacle. The variation in the wind direction could be real or could be related to the accuracy of the instruments varying between sites.

Note that the map above reflects the default settings (showing temperature and wind direction at each site) when you first open it. There are options to select rainfall or humidity instead, but note that the rainfall shown on the map is in cm not in mm, although it is in mm when you look at individual sites.

Forecasts

BoM 7 day Canberra general forecast

BoM rainfall forecast Daily (next 5 days)

BoM rainfall forecast 3-hourly (next 3 days) or 6-hourly (next 7 days)

Outlook for next 3 months

Rainfall   /   Temperature

Rainfall history

The Rainfall History web page is updated monthly and contains tables and charts of rainfall for each month since 2010.

This data is based on the manually recorded Bureau of Meteorology station at Aranda, which is the closest to The Pinnacle . There were two other manual stations nearby but they have been discontinued in the last few years.

The rainfall records from Aranda have been used to compile a rainfall history for the Reserve which is used to help understand variations in weed prevalence between seasons. They have also been used to compile mean and media rainfall for each month and year for the period since recording at Aranda began (1972).

Pinnacle rainfall extremes

Since its inception Friends of The Pinnacle have experienced some of the driest and wettest weather since 1974.

Dry Spells

  • the period from 1 July to 31 December 2019 was the driest second half of the year with only 107 mm (an average of 18 mm per month) well below the 46-year median for this period of 361 mm (60 mm per month);
  • the rainfall for the 2019 calendar year (372 mm) was the fourth smallest, ahead of 369 mm in 1982, 363 mm in 1994 and 339 mm in 2006; and
  • two of the fifth driest consecutive 6 month periods were between January 2018 and February 2020
  • the total rainfall for 2017 to 2019 (1457 mm) was the third driest 3 year period behind 2004 to 2007 and 2008 to 2009 both in the middle of the "millennium" drought.

Wet Spells

  • three of the wettest five consecutive 6 month periods have been since fotpin has been active: November 2011 to April 2012 (722 mm) September 2010 to February 2011 (706 mm) and ;September 2021 to February 2022 (702 mm);
  • seven of the wettest nine consecutive 12 month periods were between December 2021 and November 2022;
  • the two wettest calendar years were 2021 and 2022, narrowly ahead of 2010 and well clear of the next wettest year 1974; and
  • 28 of the wettest 29 consecutive 36 month periods were between June 2019 and August 2024.

Talk about droughts and flooding rains - we've had it all since fotpin has been active.