A New Year and a New Colour Guide Has Just Been Added to Australia’s Forecasting Maps
Deep purple and pink. These two colours have just been added by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology in its forecasting colour wheel maps to aid weather temperature projections exceeding 122 Fahrenheit or 50 degrees Celsius.
More than 100 wildfires are currently raging and ravaging properties across the world's driest inhabited continent. Just this week's Monday, Jan 7, it experienced its hottest day on record when the average maximum temperature across the country reached 40.33 degrees, breaching the previous record set in 1972 which was 40.17 degrees Celsius.
It won't be long before Australia eventually reaches the 50 degrees Celsius mark, the weather bureau surmised.
"The scale has just been increased and I would anticipate it is because the forecast coming from the bureau's model is showing temperatures in excess of 50 degrees," David Jones, the bureau's head of climate monitoring and prediction, told Fairfax newspapers.
Paul Lainio from the bureau explained the colours were needed to be introduced after temperatures climbed above 47 degrees Celsius in parts of South Australia.
"We noticed over the last couple of days that those charts were indicating temperatures in excess of 50 degrees and the colour scale we had didn't match that," he told ABC News. "We added the new colours so we could highlight where those extremely hot temperatures were predicted by the computer model."
"Forecasters use a whole range of computer models, the observations we receive and they come up with the most likely forecast and that could be different to those, and in fact is different at the moment to those maps."
"With the lack of cloud over central Australia - the lack of moisture - we are just seeing the conditions getting hotter and hotter... We haven't seen these temperatures before," Alasdair Hainsworth, also from the Bureau of Meteorology, said.
To date, Australia has yet to experience the 50.7 degrees Celsius it recorded experiencing on Jan 2, 1960 at Oodnadatta Airport.
But weather bureau experts advised Australia to be ready anytime for it.
"We're setting up to have a go at that record," Karl Braganza, the bureau's manager of climate monitoring, said. "On Monday we might have a shot at it."