Here's a post I've added to the thread 'Watching the Weather in Cairns':
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...t=98139&page=3
Quote:
Some thoughts about the weather and the models looking ahead, bearing in mind that I am not a trained meteorologist and have almost zero experience of tropical weather - but I am having fun studying the weather!
A trough currently moving through central Queensland will weaken/decay as it moves further east, but will still have some effect on FNQ over the weekend. The moisture and instability associated with the trough means that the weather patterns over the weekend and into early next week will NOT be indicative of what we are likely to see on Wednesday morning. But they will make for a very anxious weekend for everybody arriving in the eclipse area!
So don't lose heart if Monday and even Tuesday morning are damp and cloudy. Having said that, even by Wednesday we may not be back to the best conditions we've seen some days over the last weeks, but there sure is room for hope.
With the trough having hopefully faded away, we should be back to a typical easterly pattern, which means a variable and unpredictable amount of morning cloud along the coast, offshore and over the ranges. Under these conditions, the trend improves inland but far from certain 60km inland which is about as far as you can easily get.
Low clouds in this environment (or anywhere) are chaotic and hard to predict. Even the night before the eclipse, the weather models simply cannot say anything sensible about whether Cairns or Port Douglas or somewhere else along the coast is likely to have more or less low cloud. If you plan to be mobile, ignore the models and watch the skies and the infrared satellite image and make your decisions on that. But you'll have to make your move so early given limited road capacity and road closures that even these will be of little predictive value.
What the models can and have indicated is that on the days with the prevailing easterly pattern, inland locations tend to do better. But exactly which ones, again the models are just guessing. ie. don't place any meaning on an indication in the model that north of the centreline is going to do better than a little south.
Just because the US model appears to show a diamond shaped patch of low cloud over Mt Carbine (which it often does), or one just offshore from Port Douglas, does not mean it actually knows something about these specific locations. These are just artifacts of the low resolution of the models. The width of the eclipse track is covered by just a few grid points in the model.. nowhere near enough to accurately predict the variation in low cloud cover.
Also remember that just about every free weather website on the web is presenting data from the same US GFS weather model. They do it with different colours and icons, but it's generally the same data (Skippy Sky is a great one-stop shop for astronomers wanting to see output from the GFS model). While I would rate the European model and forecasts from the Australian BoM as just slightly better than the US model, the value is in checking three different sources to see how much they differ.
So do checkout yr.no, and search for forecasts for Cairns, Port Douglas, Mt Carbine, Mt Mulligan, Mt Gibson etc). To my knowledge this is the only publicly accessible website providing forecasts from the European model. Hit the hour-by-hour link and then the detailed option for full cloud details. Then take an average of places in a similar environment.. eg look at forecasts for Cairns and Port Douglas to get an idea of the average forecast for the coast, but don't place any meaning on the specific differences between the two.
You can also check out synthetic satellite forecast images from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology ACCESS model, but these are quite hard to interpret if you're not familiar with them. Much simpler but just as meaningful is to look at the BoM text forecast for the region. 'Scattered showers' is worse than a forecast for only 'isolated showers'. 'Partly cloudy' is a pretty good forecast for this area and only rarely will you get 'mainly sunny'. The computer models may seem like they provide a beautiful amount of detail, but what they really 'know' is nothing more than what is captured by those broad forecast statements.
Good luck!
Phil
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