Winter is wasting little time to make its mark in Orange this year.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Just one day into our coldest months, snow is forecast to hit areas around Orange above 800 metres on Monday evening, and into Tuesday morning.
Orange's elevation is 863m, while Mount Canobolas' peak is 1397m. Areas like Millthorpe 960m and Spring Hill 947m are well above the predicted falls cut-off.
There's a maximum of 10 degrees predicted for Monday, with a top of just six on Tuesday.
The cold start to winter comes on the back of the city's wettest Autumn in 30 years.
The Bureau of Meteorology's Orange Agricultural Institute station recorded 350.8mm throughout the months of March, April and May this year, which is our best run leading into winter since 1990.
An incredible 434.2mm was recorded throughout Autumn that year, with the 329mm that fell throughout April in the middle of that run filling tanks and dams across the region.
This year, the falls were more even, with 128.4mm, 138mm and 84.4mm recorded in March, April and May respectively.
They're welcome figures for farmers across Orange, with just 127.7mm falling in the same period last year as the region battled through a third-straight year of drought.
Orange has already eclipsed its rainfall total for all of 2019.
As a result of the drenching, Orange's dams are slowly filling too, with Suma Park Dam (22.77 per cent), Spring Creek Dam (37.29 per cent), Gosling Creek Dam (61 per cent) and the already full Lake Canobolas contributing to our overall storage figure of 25.52 per cent as of Sunday afternoon.
Our water storages have been slowly rising since the end of February.
And that trend looks set to continue into winter, too, with confirmation of the city's wettest Autumn in three decades coming on the back of news New South Wales is predicted to enjoy a wetter than average winter, with inland Australia a 70 per cent chance of above average rainfall, the BOM says.
HAVE YOUR SAY
- Send us a letter to the editor using the form below ...