{"id":13171,"date":"2018-08-29T18:30:24","date_gmt":"2018-08-29T18:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=13171"},"modified":"2018-08-29T18:30:24","modified_gmt":"2018-08-29T18:30:24","slug":"western-australia-has-its-wettest-and-driest-winter-in-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=13171","title":{"rendered":"Western Australia has its wettest, and driest, winter in years"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"body-200771816342556199\" readability=\"100.41954023\">\n<p class=\"speakable\">Statistics are oddly flexible things and, in the case of rain gauges, tell us only about the local area. A network of rain gauges <span>obviously\u00a0<\/span>gives a better representation of a region. However, long-term records in one place are a useful indicator, as they have been recently in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/topics\/country\/australia.html\">Australia<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"speakable\">In the town of Ravensthorpe, some 500km southeast of Perth, the gauge has caught just 85 millimetres of rain this season, 60mm short of its average. This is the town&#8217;s driest winter in 16 years. In fact, this part of Western Australia is suffering a record drought at the moment.<\/p>\n<p class=\"speakable\">Perth, however, is entirely at the other end of the scale and the western end of the state. Mount Lawley, the now official rain gauge, measured a mere 19mm on Wednesday but that was enough: at over 178mm, this has now been the wettest month since 1993, possibly since 1965.<\/p>\n<p>But, as Neil Bennett of Australia&#8217;s Bureau of Meteorology comments: &#8220;There is a little bit of a question mark because we do have a gap in our coverage for the rain gauges for Perth because we didn&#8217;t have any information recorded in 1992 and in that year the airport recorded 193.2mm.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, the season is a far cry from the wettest winter on record, which was 1945, when 957.1mm of rain fell. That was a highly unusual year. So far, 2018 has recorded just over 456mm, making it the wettest winter in 15 years and a boost for gardens, parks and the wheat belt.<\/p>\n<p>The winter wheat is looking like the best crop in the country and assuming good harvesting weather, will be welcome as a local, national or international export.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div readability=\"32\">\n<p>\n            SOURCE: <span>Al Jazeera and news agencies<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Statistics are oddly flexible things and, in the case of rain gauges, tell us only about the local area. A network of rain gauges obviously\u00a0gives a better representation of a region. However, long-term records in one place are a useful indicator, as they have been recently in Australia. In the town of Ravensthorpe, some 500km&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":13172,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13171\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}