Strange weather

Our newly acquainted Finnish astronomer family came for a visit and to enjoy our sauna on Sunday. It was warm and humid which is very rare condition in Cape Town. Shorts and sandals weather continued on Monday, but clouds started gathering on Tuesday morning as I was driving to work.

Later in the morning huge hails started pouring down. Everyone rushed outside under the awning to witness the scene. Capetownians told me that they have never seen anything like it.

The hail was up to two cm thick. I opened one big round lump of ice: inside I could see at least five separate layers of ice. High winds inside cumulonimbus clouds must have been driving those pellets up and down for quite some time.

I've been reading "Cloudspotter's Guide" recently. :)

Also, I had a discussion (at a India's classmate's birthday party) with one Eric about what causes the winter rains in Cape Town area which is something I've been wondering about. The rest of South Africa is dry during the winter, and North of here is the Namibia with its desert, so the humidity is definitely not coming from Mid-Atlantic.

What was suggested was that the cooling of the continent during winter months allows the cyclones that constantly circle the Antarctic Ocean spread to lower latitudes. The heat in the summer really seems to keep the bad weather further South.

I've been following the development of cloud cover on my Linux desktop using automatically downloaded global cloud image that gets wrap around a realistic looking Earth by a program called xplanet.

It seems to be impossible to find anywhere online a decent weather map covering Southern Africa that would have isobars on it.

Weather is back to rainy, windy and cool. A typical stormy winter's day!