Tag: Cape storm

INCOMING! (Winter)

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Right. That’s it. Summer ended a couple of weeks or a bit more ago, and Autumn has clearly just been bypassed.

I say this because OMG WTF BBQ have you seen the rain forecast for tomorrow and Monday in the Western Cape?

Bad in Cape Agulhas:

Badder in Cape Town:

I’ve been doing some rudimentary calculations, and that’s a lot of rain.
And this is Black South Easter rain, not a cold front. An overflowing shelf of precipitation, pinned against the Cape coast for 48 hours, not going anywhere.

Might be advisable to check your gutters ahead of the winter, like, now. Today.

And then wrap up warmly, grab some red wine, light the fire, and hunker down.

Here we go again

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Gorgeous pre-frontal skies in Cape Town this morning can only mean one thing: a front is coming.

The hint is in the name, see?

And yes, it does look like tomorrow’s weather is going to be pretty ropey, then we’re in for a couple of very chilly days before Sunday, when… well… it’s looking positively biblical.

The weather apps agree on the timing, but are all at odds over the actual amount of rainfall. We’re looking at anything from 10-20mm tomorrow and anything from 22-50mm on Sunday. It’ll be cold and windy as well, just to add injury to injury.
Don’t expect daily highs of anything more than 15°C*.
Do expect winds gusting to 85+kph.

All of this will put additional strain on the electricity supply, which doesn’t even do well when everything is peachy, so it’s full-on recipe for disaster stuff. Ugh.

Thus, it would seem likely that tomorrow will be our first fire of the season. For the record, our first fire of last winter was 25th April. This is probably the most predictable weather-related thing that’s ever occurred in Cape Town.

* we’ve been down “15 isn’t cold road” many times before. don’t force me to make you to turn right onto “well 30 isn’t hot avenue”.

The weather: lots going on

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I mentioned that there were some rather awful conditions on the higher inland part of my journey on Friday. And then how Saturday was an absolute peach of a day. Today is also stunning: light breeze, near cloudless skies, 26oC. But tomorrow… tomorrow looks like fun. Here’s a weather IR view of the country and surrounds taken about an hour ago:

Top right (purple, round) is Tropical Cyclone Freddy. It’s heading towards Madagascar and has sustained wind speeds of 250kph within. That’s the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane. Landfall is not going to be pretty.

Then there’s an arc of thunderstorms (orange and red blotches) across the North East of SA. They’re curling down across Botswana and Namibia and might even get down as far as the Western Cape. But they’re likely to be pushed back by that huge cold front (multicoloured swoosh) in the bottom left.
That’s going to hit Cape Town tomorrow and promises to bring “high intensity” rain and strong winds to the Western Cape.

It’s not like we don’t need the rain. We just don’t need it all in one go.

My apps are suggesting the wind turning to the NW late this evening and then increasing in strength throughout the morning. The rain seems to arrive just before dawn, with the heaviest stuff mid to late morning, correlating with the wind which could gust to 92kph.

According to sources, it “demands absolute attention”, so while it’s not a Freddy in any way, shape or form, it’s still probably best not to underestimate it.

Stay safe.

Day 104 – Tenuous tsunami parallels

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Let’s make things clear right from the start here.

I’m not saying that Cape Town is going to get hit by a tsunami.
We’ve covered that concern here: something I would strongly advise you to read if you think that people are paranoid about Covid-19. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

They walk among us.

But I digress. Often.

One of the enduring images of the 2004 Indonesian tsunami was the drawback: the water disappearing from the shorelines of beaches and resorts about to be hit by the tsunami, effectively (some would say ‘exactly’) like a huge low tide.

In some places, this drawback was up to a kilometre. And in most cases, there was good correlation between the size of the drawback and the extent of the damage caused by the tsunami that followed.

If we ignore all scientific reason for a moment and apply this clear inverse proportionality to tomorrow’s predicted storm, I think we’re in trouble. Because today’s weather in Cape Town could not be calmer or more beautiful. So still. So clear. So utterly perfect.

Not a cloud in the sky. Not a breath of wind.

If only there were some term that one could use to describe such a period of placid weather ahead of a predicted tempest.

And yet… just out there in the bottom left corner:

A frothing mass of low pressure, general misery, howling winds and all the rain we didn’t get in 2017. All due to begin tomorrow afternoon/evening and then be followed in by a second front on Sunday into Monday.

And our eyes are already on another vicious lump of nastiness heading out of Uruguay towards SA like Luis Suarez’s poor sportsmanship and bad temper in 2010.

And possibly every bit as bitey.

But let’s just get through this weekend first. Here’s what we’re expecting to see at 0800 local time on Friday morning:

Big winds, much rain, huge waves, general unpleasantness.

In all seriousness though, it does look like quite a nasty one, so please look out for your community and maybe consider helping out your local shelter, which will obviously be under more pressure than usual over the next few days.

Day 94 – Wave, daddy!

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[Glasto (2) post postponed for the moment, because…]

We went for a drive down the Atlantic Seaboard yesterday. Well… a bit of it, anyway.

Weather like yesterday’s can’t be ignored and we needed the fresh, unsullied air from the ocean.

There was plenty of it to go around, with some frothing chaos on Slangkop beach:

And some grim, stormy seas behind the lighthouse:

It’s always difficult to demonstrate the sheer scale of the seas in photos. So just suffice to say that I was very glad to be on the land and not on the water. Big waves. Big.

The weather was dark, moody and gloomy one minute:

But patchy sunlight scudded across the bay every now and again, giving some occasional delicious light:

 

You can see all the photos (that I felt were worth sharing) from yesterday here.

And you can come back here for that other Glasto-inspired post tomorrow.