Rainfall Summary for the Townsville Floods as of February 6th 2019

06 Feb Rainfall Summary for the Townsville Floods as of February 6th 2019

The rainfall totals that keep on keeping on.. even when it seemed like the bulk of it was over, another 50-150mm has fallen over the Townsville area overnight with up to 250mm in some isolated areas. Thankfully for those further South, the predicted 200mm+ didn’t come off, with models failing to pick the monsoon trough convergence movements – this limited the impacts further South, despite some high accumulative totals occurring over the past 10 days regardless of last night. 

The top 24hr totals up to 9am Wednesday include:
• Michael Creek 239mm
• Upper Stone 222mm
• Running Creek 199mm
• Rollingstone 187mm
• Paluma 180mm
• Eungella 150mm
• Widespread falls of 50-150mm across Greater Townsville
• Widespread falls of 50-100mm across the Whitsunday Peninsula (Proserpine, Airlie Beach) back into the Eungella Ranges

Greater Townsville 24hr rainfall via BOM

10 day accumulative totals:
• Paluma 2406mm
• Paluma Alert 2299mm
• Upper Bluewater 2213mm
• Woolshed 1962mm
• Rollingstone 1899mm
• Upper Black River 1891mm
• Mt Margaret 1721mm
• Sandy Plateau (highest in the Central Coast area) 1619mm
• Widespread falls of 1200-1700mm across the Greater Townsville area
Note: We have had unofficial totals of in excess of 2600mm from this event, sent in via private message from the Hervey Range area

10-day rainfall accumulation graph for the top 6 locations

Perspective for Paluma’s 2406mm:
• It is 1.4x Darwin’s annual total, its also just 300mm shy of Darwin’s record yearly total
• It is higher than the record yearly total for Townsville (2399mm in 2000)
• Its more than double Brisbane’s yearly average
• Its 2.5 years worth of rainfall for Sydney
• It is the equivalent of 4.5 years worth of rainfall for Adelaide – Adelaide would also need to break its record for yearly rainfall for almost 3 consecutive years to match what Paluma has recorded in 10 days.
• Its almost 15 years worth of rainfall for Birdsville!

Additional Notes:
• Paluma’s 2406mm is likely the highest rainfall event total (regardless of duration) from the past 40 years – since Mt Bellenden Ker recorded well over 3000mm.
• Upper Bluewater, Paluma and Rollingstone have maintained their run of 100mm days, with 10 consecutive now. While it would be a very lengthy process to check, there is every chance this is the highest consecutive tally of 100mm days for well over 20 years, possibly even over 50 years as many of the high end rain events didn’t cover 10 days over the past 70 years and Mt Bellenden Ker’s 3800mm in 1979 was over 8 days, not 10+. (Not sure why Paluma was removed from previous blogs with this streak – this was an oversight) – Several locations between Townsville / Ross River Dam and Ingham had a streak of 7-8 consecutive days of 100mm+ as well
• Upper Bluewater is still the only location to record 3 300mm+ days from this event. Woolshed still holds the highest consecutive 200mm days with 5.
• Well over 100 locations have now surpassed the 1000mm mark for this event
• Townsville is just 97mm shy of its wettest February in recorded history (960mm from 2009 is the record) and the 1257mm over the past 10 days for Townsville City is also well above the previous 10 day accumulative record for the City.