Victoria: Southeast Low 6-10 September

Excellent. My friend reports the same sort of totals in Olinda (~200m south of the Cookoo). So hefty soaking up there.

Can't see much more than drizzle at the moment. Can't see the hills. Was a tremendous amount of rain/drizzle mix before but backed off. Lots of sitting water. Won't be there later!!

pretty dismal totals for the western burbs, Essendon Ap with 4mm falling over the past couple days..... could be worse i suppose.

Sun trying to filter through the drizzle here presently but drizzle continues to win out.

To 9am: 95mm @ Baw Baw
65mm @ Kinglake
53mm @ Mt Gregory
50mm @ Mt Dandenong
43mm @ Waburton

Since 9am: 7mm @ Baw Baw
7mm @ Mt Dandenong
4mm @ The Basin

So some very useful results

Hopefully some showers and thunderstorms can develop on a decaying front on Saturday afternoon to reenforce the rainfall achieved and runoff achieved.

126mm of rainfall since Monday at Mt.Baw.Baw should be some more runoff into the Thomson all helps I guess

15mm total for this system here.

26mm here...sensational result yet again...dams are now officially overflowing all round the yarra ranges..

But the Thompson has no water.....yeah and im an astronaut..

Upper Yarra only had 10mm the night before

Time for you to take a drive up there Karl and take some photos again..

my mother noted 44mm today and yesterday for Wesburn.

I haven't seen such big numbers for how many millimetres it rained on the reservoirs/catchments on the MelbourneWater website in ages.

The reason the Thomson has no water in it is rather simple.
1,000,000 ML dam with 50,000 hectare catchment.
100mm of rain per hectare = 1ML
Therefor to fill the Thomson dam requires 2,000mm of rain with no losses!
Our problem is the size of our catchments (200,000 hectare), not the size of our dams. In comparison Sydney and Brisbane are about four times the size!

Rob you are quite right. And generally the setup for decent rains in the Thomson in particular is it to come from the SE and E on the western sides of lows or very deep NW cloudbands.

The western facing dams should have been made larger.

O'Shannesy is a very very wet part of the world and I have spent a lot of time in that part of the world and would stand by rainfall figures in that location. It will rain from anything out there!!

Yes I think I will Anthony. I did that a few years back when they said we were dropping very very fast and the Upper Yarra was 40%.. well it had more than 40% I can tell you that!!! Nearly over the spill way!

Looks like we will get a return of the drizzle tonight as most SW flow continues. Also wouldn't rule out the odd shower when the flow goes NW'ly tomorrow as we go into strong warm air advection.

One of the coldest days of the year in the Dandenongs with max's around 7C.

BTW one thing that have slipped under the radar with this system is how warm it's been in the alps. The freezing level has been up around 1600m which is crazy stuff for a spring time SW'ly set up. I've seen high freezing levels with SE'ly wrap arounds off the Tasman sea but this system has sourced much of its air from the SW and still been warm. It should have dumped 50cm of snow not 50-100mm of rain

This is also important for runoff - snow runs off much more effectively as the ground is often frozen and it also means that there is not much snow in the catchments ready to melt when the next spell of warm weather comes on.

Anyway - just about time to look to the new system (EC has 20mm+ for FC ).

PS Just check my event total - 42mm. Very hard to get accurate obs up here in thick drizzle with all the big trees to our southwest - so could have been 50 or 60mm but will never know (I had two gauges out last night and they disagreed by 300% over 6 hours of drizzle 2mm versus 6mm).

Well it was a gloomy day here, with stratus covering the whole sky, and occasional drizzle at times. No rainfall to 9am. Temperatures were nice to start, but then got cold this afternoon.

Forecast is for frost and drizzle around tomorrow morning just looking quickly at western and north central weather district forecasts.

1C tipped for Ballarat tomorrow morning with drizzle. That would mean frozen drizzle. Can't see the mins that low if there is cloud and drizzle around, sorry BOM but that just doesn't make sense.

Another 0.6mm overnight and a little drizzle still falling when I left home. The cloud base has lifted a lot, however, so the air mass is clearly starting to dry out though looks like Sc will stay with us all day in the south as the winds don't go NW til late.

BTW I notice Lyndhurst has had 205mm overnight

Perhaps a shower or two with a possible fox in Lyndhurst this morning??

The worst cloud outside but keeps things moist.

After yesterdays rise of 0.2% today the Melbourne dams have gone another 0.3% to 29.5% from 29.0% Tuesday which is a reasonable rise I suppose Upper Yarra leading the way with strong inflows. Should get to 30.0% by early next week even if it doesn't rain but with Sundays bit of rain should help.

It's amazing to see that even though we've had a record breaking driest first half of the year, we've had more rain for the whole year so far than last year. Well that's what it says from the melbourne water website with some of the reservoir and catchment rainfall data.

Hey Dez
Melbournes 2009 total is well down on the amount we had by this time last year, something in the vicinity of 70 to 80 mm.
Great inflows yesterday and today for our dams, over 3000mgl.

Someone has turned the light on here! It has gone from dull and cloudy to Sunny and blue skies in a matter of a switch.. Heaps of sunshine now through the Northern and Western suburbs edgining towards the Eastern suburbs.

Seems to be peeling nicely through the sky here too. Nice to see the high pressure ridge move through to the east now and move this cloud offshore.

A somewhat cool night to come ahead of a nice day. Could be some very large diurnal ranges tomorrow.

I see there is a fire weather warning for Mallee - extreme fire danger...hmmm

The Mallee is horribly dry - the north in particular has had no effective rain for about 6 weeks. The soil dryness is running at levels more typical of mid summer.

BTW happy to report 70mm for the event from a friend in Olinda. Looks to me like most of the Dandenongs got 40-80mm with the best about the highest parts of Olinda/Mt Dandenong.