Norseman - Hyden road condition

The weather bureau has a really handy tool for working out how much rain there's likely to have been by looking at recent weather maps of both rainfall and temperature.

On their website (bom.gov.au) click on climate then climate maps then rainfall. You can look at the last month, week or day and if there's been a lot of rain in the last month or week, then look at the temperature map to see if it's been hot and form a judgment as to whether it's likely to have dried up.

Click here for rainfall for last day

Paul - Yes, the BOM is fairly good to refer to - but remember these points.

1. There's sizeable areas that have no, or poor weather coverage, in W.A.
For example, there's nothing recording weather between Southern Cross, Yilgarn South, Holt Rock, Norseman, and Kalgoorlie.
You can have a large thunderstorm covering a wide area in this region, producing a lot of rain, and it's not recorded anywhere.
The best you can do is check on Kalgoorlie radar, but you need to be right up with current radar returns. Even then, the radar isn't anywhere near 100% accurate.

2. As a result, you can set off through this region in fine weather, and suddenly run into large amounts of water over the road, and very slippery and boggy conditions, from a recent thunderstorm that is now dispersed. It's happened to me.

I find the following section of the BOM site is more useful - it contains all the recording stations and you can get the rainfall figures for the last hour, or the last 24 hrs, or falls since 9:00AM.
In addition, this map has locations listed, which better assists you as regards orientation, as compared to a generalised rainfall map that doesn't show locations.

If you click on each weather region, the page zooms in on the weather region, and mousing over each station gives you the rainfalls or river levels, according to your selection.

BOM map - river and rainfall data

Cheers, Ron.

Yeah I take your point Ron, but BoM doesn't necessarily rely on actual rainfall readings to project where the rain is or was. And on remote roads, the shires aren't necessarily going to know either.

Actually since my earlier comment I've noticed there is a loop in the rainfall map with is even more handy.

Chris, thanks for the feedback. The dust would be settled today, there's been a band of thunderstorms travelling through the Wheatbelt and Southern Goldfields in the last 24 hrs, and falls of 5-15mm have been generally recorded throughout the region.

Cheers, Ron.