Record heat in Sydney

Sydney weather: Heatwave breaks another hottest night record

 

BOM New South WalesVerified account‏@BOM_NSW

Did you have trouble sleeping last night? It was Sydney's warmest Jan night on record. #recordbreakingheat http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/dwo/IDCJDW2124.latest.shtml …

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1:18 PM - 14 Jan 2017

ABC,
15 January, 2017

No, you did not imagine it — Friday night was ridiculously hot — because it was the hottest Sydney night in January since city weather records began.

Hottest nights are measured by the lowest temperature reached during the night.

On Friday night, the temperature in the city got to its lowest point at a sweaty 26.4 degrees Celsius at about 11:00pm, the Bureau of Meteorology [BOM] said.

Then it just got hotter, climbing to 31C by 1:00am.

"[Friday night] was actually the warmest January night the city has ever recorded, and records for the city station go back to 1858 so there's quite a while of records there," BOM duty forecaster Rebecca Kamitakahara said.

This may seem a little like groundhog day if you are a weather watcher, you may remember that just last month Sydney recorded its highest ever overnight minimum for December.

But before you complain too much, eastern city-siders, think about your wilting buddies out at Penrith in the far west.

At midnight, it was still around 36C in Penrith, and it took until 4:00am for the gauge to get below 30C.

They also recorded their highest minimum temperature of 28.6C in Penrith

"That's actually the warmest night the station was recorded since it opened, but that station was opened in 1995 so records don't go back as far as [Sydney city]," Ms Kamitakahara said.

Clouds trapped the heat

Ms Kamitakahara said there were two reasons the city did not cool off on Friday night.

"We had a combination of an extremely low air-mass over NSW broadly, which is what is contributing to those heat wave conditions, so there was a limit to how much it would cool off anyway overnight," she said.

"In addition to that we had a fairly decent layer of cloud cover overnight, which meant the ground couldn't cool off overnight."

Low-intensity heatwave conditions continue in northern New South Wales and southern Queensland over the weekend.

The severity will increase over the coming days and spread back down across much of the south-east of Australia from Monday to Wednesday, according to BOM forecasting.

There are fires across NSW with crews working hard to contain blazes that had prompted emergency alerts on Friday.