It’s been an extraordinarily dry wet season in the Top End … but now it’s started off being a very wet dry season! Grey nomads who have beaten the crowds by getting up north early might have been caught off guard by yesterday’s 90-minute deluge in Darwin, which dumped more than twice as much rain as usual for the entire month of May.
In just one-and-a-half hours, 47.2mm of rain was recorded at Darwin Airport rain gauge, that’s more than the 46.2mm that fell during the wet season month of April.
Senior forecaster at the Bureau of Meteorology, Laura Boekel, told the ABC that while storms were not uncommon during May, the ferocity of the downpour was unusual.
“The storms came in from the northeast of Darwin and tracked across all morning,” Ms Boekel said. “”It just happened to be a large amount of rain after a particularly dry wet season.”
She said Darwin was likely to see more rain during the next seven days, although not quite as heavy. May is known as a ‘transition month’ as the dry season begins.
The downpour in Darwin was confined to the north-western tip of the Northern Territory.
