The Australian Weather Calendar 2010 – 13 Inspirational skies and landscapes from Down Under

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has produced a calendar every year since 1985. The 2010 calendar features the best photos from its public competition.

The calendar contains information on the Bureau of Meteorology’s role in monitoring the oceans around Australia for tides, tsunami and weather-influencing factors such as sea-surface temperatures, some meteorological information about the weather events in the 12 main photographs, plus background information about the photographer.

Cover: Cumulus mediocris clouds over Port Phillip Bay, Victoria, as seen from Arthurs Seat, 2.30 pm, August 2007.

Some pictures simply demand to be taken, says Ben Albrecht, owner of a jewellery gallery in Melbourne. Ben had just enjoyed lunch with his wife’s family from Italy at a Mornington Peninsula vineyard when they stopped at Arthurs Seat. The lookout offers one of Victoria’s most spectacular panoramas over Port Phillip Bay.

“It was an amazing day (in August 2007), blue as blue, with two cloud layers,” Ben recalls. “So still, with only one boat visible.” A keen photographer from schooldays, Ben always keeps a camera in the car.

January: Clouds over Clonbinane, central Victoria, hold the promise of showers or thunderstorms, 7 November 2007, 6.25 pm. The clouds are stratocumulus cumulonimbogenitus (front centre), cumulonimbus capillatus (rear left) and altocumulus (top left).

Educational consultant Ross Kimber has been a keen photographer for 30 years and takes his camera everywhere. He was returning to Melbourne on the Hume Freeway in November 2007 when he spotted a storm near Clonbinane as the sun was setting. “I loved the light on the paddocks; the impending drama,” he recalls. The Bureau had forecast the risk of a shower or thunderstorm about the hills near Melbourne. Ross says he was worried the light might have faded before he could stop the car and take a photo, but fortunately he caught “a beautiful moment in time”. Ross says digital photography has made a huge difference to his pastime. “No more prohibitive film costs, no more lab work; I’m in complete control,” he says.

February: Rain falls at sunset on Paroo Station, Meekatharra, central Western Australia, 1 April 2007, 6.15 pm. The clouds are cumulonimbus praecipitatio.

Louise Ford is a keen photographer and pastoralist on Paroo Station, near Meekatharra, central Western Australia, where she and husband Jim run 1000 cattle on 200,000 hectares. The thunderstorm that contributed useful rain to their property in April 2007 — “we usually need a good, soaking rain,” she says — excited Louise. She rushed to the back of the homestead and photographed the storm as the sun set.

March: A rainbow forms over Victoria Dock and SullivanÕs Cove, Hobart, during pre-frontal showers, 23 February 2008, 4.55 pm. The clouds are nimbostratus praecipitatio.

Web designer Jamie Scuglia enjoys his holidays around Australia, camera always on standby. In February 2008, Jamie was ensconced in a Hobart hotel and by late afternoon was glum about the less-than-summery water view. But the room turned out to be the right place at the right time as the sun came out during a rain shower and fashioned a rainbow over Victoria Dock and Sullivan’s Cove alongside the Derwent River. “The interesting lighting lasted perhaps 10 minutes,” he recalls.

April: A sea fog blows in over Newport beach, late 2004.

Professional photographer John Grainger frequently pursues weather phenomena around Sydney. In November 2004, he was in the central city about midday when he caught a glimpse of fog coming in from the sea. Hoping the sea fog would linger, he drove to the northern beaches, stopping at each headland to check the backdrop for his photographs. After about an hour he reached Newport Beach and waited for the fog to thin a little to reveal glimpses of buildings, bathers and Norfolk Island pines.

May: Irisation or cloud iridescence amid cumulus cloud at Katherine Gorge, Northern Territory, 2 December 2005, 3.30 pm.

Enthusiastic photographer Peter Ostry frequently visits friends in the Northern Territory and particularly enjoys photographing the territory’s famous thunderstorms. But one tranquil afternoon in December 2005 he was “doing the tourist river cruise” on the Katherine Gorge when the peace was broken by his niece Angela who cried: “Look at that!” while pointing to rainbow-like colours amid the clouds. Peter, a refinery production operator at Geelong in Victoria, reached for his camera and captured an unusually bright cloud iridescence. “It was a spectacular hour-long display of intense colour during the build-up to the Wet season,” he recalls. “I’d only seen fleeting examples before.”

June: Aurora australis (the Southern Lights) over Casey station, Antarctica, 28 June 2008, 11:27 pm. The green colour is emitted when oxygen atoms in the upper atmosphere are struck by charged particles from the sun.

Todor Iolovski quit his job as an electronics engineer for the adventure of a 14-month Antarctic posting as a Bureau of Meteorology Technical Officer (Engineering) at Australia’s Casey Station. In June 2008, on a clear, windless night at about midnight, Todor’s 30-year passion for photography enabled him to endure two hours outdoors at minus 20 degrees to take 10 long-exposure photographs. His picture of the Aurora australis was an exposure of 3 minutes 40 seconds, which also captured star trails as the earth turned. “In such very dry conditions, the camera won’t freeze,” Todor says, but he kept four spare batteries in his pocket because they can fail at such low temperatures. “The hard part was wandering around for new vantage points as the aurora changed direction, from east, to north-east, to south.” Todor only went inside when it got too cold to change the batteries.

July: A storm front and rain approach yachts anchored at Rushcutters Bay, Sydney, on the afternoon of 7 August 2008. The clouds are cumulonimbus with arcus (shelf cloud) and praecipitatio (rain).

Terry Ross, a former current affairs cameraman, now enjoys a less stressful life as a real estate photographer. But urgency was the order of the day mid-afternoon in August 2008 when he glimpsed storm clouds rolling over Sydney harbour — “huge, like a big cigar”, he says. Terry sped to Rushcutters Bay, possibly ignoring a number of road rules. “I was thinking madly of the right lens and exposure; it’s no good to just whack it on automatic mode.” He shot a dozen frames in a minute and got soaked retreating to the car. The thunderstorm, rain and small hail that hit Sydney was due to a cold front and low pressure system that had moved across New South Wales, producing heavy rainfall in the south of the state and snow on the Central Tablelands earlier in the day.

August: Sun shines through dense smoke near Mt Lindsay, Denmark, southwest Western Australia, April 2004. The smoke was from a fuel-reduction burn.

Kade Bouwman always keeps his camera nearby when he operates earthmoving equipment around Denmark, near Albany, in southwest Western Australia. His enthusiasm paid off in April 2004 when he watched helicopters drop a ring of fire bombs into forest near Mt Lindsay for a fuel reduction burn. “Soon there was a circle of fire — and whoof, suddenly the updraught drew flames into the middle, and up she went, spectacularly but briefly. Thirty minutes later, everything was quiet.”

September: Floodwaters move through Ourdel Station, Windorah, southwest Queensland, on a February afternoon, 2008. Stratocumulus stratiformis clouds are overhead. Windorah is in the Channel Country, which drains to Lake Eyre.

Happiness is being belted into a small helicopter without a door and leaning out to photograph a vast southwest Queensland landscape under water. Cyclonic rains had transformed the state’s Channel Country in February 2008 for only the fifth time in the past 30 years, and local school principal and station owner Helen Commens was there to record it. She says she was glad to have captured just a fraction of “this amazing 360-degree water world”, before the run-off drained slowly from Cooper Creek to inland Australia. The flooding at Windorah lasted for about six weeks and peaked at about six metres on 29 January.

October: Mammatus cloud associated with cumulonimbus over Derby airport, northwest Western Australia, at sunset, 9 December 2004, 6 pm, in memory of Maria Elizabeth Robinson.

Few people know Western Australia’s vast landscapes as well as Tony Robinson. For seven years he was a pilot with the Royal Flying Doctor Service, operating out of Port Hedland and Carnarvon, and is now a flight operations inspector for the Civil Aviation Safety Authority. Tony has also worked out of more than 30 major and minor airports, always with a camera ready in the cockpit or the car. This routine paid off late one afternoon in December 2004 when thunderstorm clouds appeared over Derby airport in northwest WA. The mammatus clouds, associated with a deepening trough or front, loomed briefly “out of nowhere” from the base of the storm cloud directly over the small terminal.

November: A thunderstorm front approaches New Brighton Beach, north coast of New South Wales, 30 December 2008, 4.03 pm, with cumulonimbus clouds and stratocumulus extensions in the foreground.

Kathryn Lynch’s family knows she will drop everything and be out the door with her camera when dramatic weather looms near their home at Pittwater, on Sydney’s northern beaches. The recent convert to photography is “really, really enjoying it, becoming a real weather watcher, and taking two cameras everywhere.” Kathryn was holidaying near Byron Bay in December 2008, and was tracking a storm on the Bureau of Meteorology website when conditions became very hot and still mid-afternoon. “Then a terrific wind whipped things along the beach as the tail-end of the storm came over,” she says. “I kept on shooting, shielding the camera between shots; and the cricketers also played on.”

December: Lightning under cumulonimbus cloud, Moana Beach, south of Adelaide, 6 December 2005, 1.14 am.

John McDermott, an opal miner, artist and keen photographer, was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. In December 2005, in the middle of the night, John was standing knee-deep in the shallows at Moana Beach, south of Adelaide, photographing lightning and its reflection in the water. “Suddenly I felt an electric charge in my hair,” he recalls, “and the tripod was resonating with a bit of a hum like a transformer.” He quickly splashed to dry land, and now vows: “I’ll only do that once!” John’s technique for photographing lightning is to leave the shutter open and use quick reflexes to close it.

All photographs are copyright the original photographers credited.

More information on the Australian Bureau of Meteorology Calendar and the weather phenomenon depicted in the photographs is available from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology web site.