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Ash Wednesday Bushfires
The Ash Wednesday bushfires, known in South Australia as Ash Wednesday II, were a series of bushfires that occurred in south-eastern Australia on 16 February 1983, which was Ash Wednesday. Within twelve hours, more than 180 fires fanned by hot winds of up to caused widespread destruction across the states of Victoria and South Australia. Years of severe drought and extreme weather combined to create one of Australia's worst fire days in a century. The fires were the deadliest bushfire in Australian history until the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009. 75 people died as a result of the fires; 47 in Victoria, and 28 in South Australia. This included 14 Country Fire Authority (CFA) and three Country Fire Service (CFS) volunteer firefighters. Many fatalities were as a result of firestorm conditions caused by a sudden and violent wind change in the evening which rapidly changed the direction and size of the fire front. The speed and ferocity of the flames, aided by abundant fuels and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mount Macedon
Mount Macedon ( Aboriginal Woiwurrung language: ''Geboor'' or ''Geburrh'') is a dormant volcano that is part of the Macedon Ranges of the Great Dividing Range, located in the Central Highlands region of Victoria, Australia. The mountain has an elevation of with a prominence of and is located approximately northwest of Melbourne. Etymology The mountain is known as ''Geboor'' or ''Geburrh'' in the Aboriginal Woiwurrung language of the Wurundjeri people. The mountain was sighted by Hamilton Hume and William Hovell on their 1824 expedition to Port Phillip from New South Wales. They named it Mount Wentworth. It was renamed Mount Macedon by explorer Major Thomas Mitchell who ascended the mountain in 1836. He named it after Philip of Macedon in honour of the fact that he was able to view Port Philip from the summit. Several other geographic features along the path of his third ''Australia Felix'' expedition were named after figures of Ancient Macedonia including the nearby Ca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bureau Of Meteorology
The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM or BoM) is an executive agency of the Australian Government responsible for providing weather services to Australia and surrounding areas. It was established in 1906 under the Meteorology Act, and brought together the state meteorological services that existed before then. The states officially transferred their weather recording responsibilities to the Bureau of Meteorology on 1 January 1908. History The Bureau of Meteorology was established on 1 January 1908 following the passage of the ''Meteorology Act 1906''. Prior to Federation in 1901, each colony had had its own meteorological service, with all but two colonies also having a subsection devoted to astronomy. In August 1905, federal home affairs minister Littleton Groom surveyed state governments for their willingness to cede control, finding South Australia and Victoria unwilling. However, at a ministerial conference in April 1906 the state governments agreed to transfer responsibility for m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
CSIRO
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is an Australian Government The Australian Government, also known as the Commonwealth Government, is the national government of Australia, a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Like other Westminster-style systems of government, the Australian Government ... agency responsible for scientific research. CSIRO works with leading organisations around the world. From its headquarters in Canberra, CSIRO maintains more than 50 sites across Australia and in France, Chile and the United States, employing about 5,500 people. Federally funded scientific research began in Australia years ago. The Advisory Council of Science and Industry was established in 1916 but was hampered by insufficient available finance. In 1926 the research effort was reinvigorated by establishment of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), which strengthened national science leadership and increased ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Relative Humidity
Humidity is the concentration of water vapor present in the air. Water vapor, the gaseous state of water, is generally invisible to the human eye. Humidity indicates the likelihood for precipitation, dew, or fog to be present. Humidity depends on the temperature and pressure of the system of interest. The same amount of water vapor results in higher relative humidity in cool air than warm air. A related parameter is the dew point. The amount of water vapor needed to achieve saturation increases as the temperature increases. As the temperature of a parcel of air decreases it will eventually reach the saturation point without adding or losing water mass. The amount of water vapor contained within a parcel of air can vary significantly. For example, a parcel of air near saturation may contain 28 g of water per cubic metre of air at , but only 8 g of water per cubic metre of air at . Three primary measurements of humidity are widely employed: absolute, relative, and specific. Ab ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gale-force
The Beaufort scale is an empirical measure that relates wind speed to observed conditions at sea or on land. Its full name is the Beaufort wind force scale. History The scale was devised in 1805 by the Irish hydrographer Francis Beaufort (later Rear Admiral), a Royal Navy officer, while serving on . The scale that carries Beaufort's name had a long and complex evolution from the previous work of others (including Daniel Defoe the century before) to when Beaufort was Hydrographer of the Navy in the 1830s, when it was adopted officially and first used during the voyage of HMS ''Beagle'' under Captain Robert FitzRoy, who was later to set up the first Meteorological Office (Met Office) in Britain giving regular weather forecasts. In the 18th century, naval officers made regular weather observations, but there was no standard scale and so they could be very subjective – one man's "stiff breeze" might be another's "soft breeze". Beaufort succeeded in standardising the sca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Australian Bureau Of Meteorology
Australian(s) may refer to: Australia * Australia, a country * Australians, citizens of the Commonwealth of Australia ** European Australians ** Anglo-Celtic Australians, Australians descended principally from British colonists ** Aboriginal Australians, indigenous peoples of Australia as identified and defined within Australian law * Australia (continent) ** Indigenous Australians * Australian English, the dialect of the English language spoken in Australia * Australian Aboriginal languages * ''The Australian'', a newspaper * Australiana, things of Australian origins Other uses * Australian (horse), a racehorse * Australian, British Columbia, an unincorporated community in Canada See also * The Australian (other) * Australia (other) Australia is a country in the Southern Hemisphere. Australia may also refer to: Places * Name of Australia relates the history of the term, as applied to various places. Oceania *Australia (continent), or Sahul, the landmasses ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Mallee
The Mallee covers the most northwesterly part of Victoria, bounded by the South Australian and New South Wales borders. Definitions of the south-eastern boundary vary, however, all are based on the historic Victorian distribution of mallee eucalypts. These trees dominate the surviving vegetation through most of Mallee, (except for swamps and areas along waterways, and very rare stands of ''casuarina''). Its biggest settlements are Mildura and Swan Hill. At the 2011 census, the four local government areas (LGAs) that are usually thought to define the district had a combined population of . The area of these same four LGAs is . There is an adjacent area also once covered with mallee scrub called "the Mallee" in South Australia, which is alternatively called the Murray Mallee. Geography and climate The Mallee is, for all practical purposes, completely flat and very low-lying: in fact, for long geological periods the whole region has been inundated by the ocean. Most of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wimmera
The Wimmera is a region of the Australian state of Victoria. The district is located within parts of the Loddon Mallee and the Grampians regions; and covers the dryland farming area south of the range of Mallee scrub, east of the South Australia border and north of the Great Dividing Range. It can also be defined as the land within the social catchment of Horsham, its main settlement. Most of the Wimmera is very flat, with only the Grampians and Mount Arapiles rising above vast plains and the low plateaux that form the Great Divide in this part of Victoria. The Grampians are very rugged and tilted, with many sheer sandstone cliffs on their eastern sides, but gentle slopes on the west. In the context of the Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia, the Wimmera is a sub-region of located within the Murray Darling Depression bioregion. The Wimmera is one of the nine districts in Victoria used for weather forecasting by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The Victor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Melbourne Dust Storm
The 1983 Melbourne dust storm was a meteorological phenomenon that occurred during the afternoon of 8 February 1983, throughout much of Victoria, Australia and affected the capital, Melbourne. Red soil, dust and sand from Central and Southeastern Australia was swept up in high winds and carried southeast through Victoria. The dust storm was one of the most dramatic consequences of the 1982/83 drought, at the time the worst in Australian history and is, in hindsight, viewed as a precursor to the Ash Wednesday bushfires which were to occur eight days later. Background In late 1982 and early 1983, the El Niño weather cycle had brought record drought to almost all of eastern Australia, with Victoria's Mallee and northern Wimmera severely affected. During the morning of Tuesday 8 February 1983, a strong but dry cold front began to cross Victoria, preceded by hot, gusty northerly winds. The loose topsoil in the Mallee and Wimmera was picked up by the wind and collected into a huge clou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greendale, Victoria
Greendale is a town in central Victoria, Australia in the Shire of Moorabool local government area, west north west of the state capital, Melbourne. At the , Greendale and the surrounding area had a population of 602. Prior to European settlement, the area around Greendale was inhabited by the Kutung, the Wathourung, the Wurunjeri, the Jaara and the Ngurelban indigenous tribes. When European settlers arrived in the area in the late 1830s conflict developed between the two groups. The early settlers noticed a variety of native flora and fauna including kangaroos, bandicoots, dingoes and two species of quoll Quolls (; genus ''Dasyurus'') are carnivorous marsupials native to Australia and New Guinea. They are primarily nocturnal and spend most of the day in a den. Of the six species of quoll, four are found in Australia and two in New Guinea. Anoth .... Greendale Post Office opened on 1 January 1867. John Cain, Premier of Victoria, was born in Greendale in 1882. Referen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bacchus Marsh
Bacchus Marsh (Wathawurrung: ''Pullerbopulloke'') is an urban centre and suburban locality in Victoria, Australia located approximately north west of the state capital Melbourne and west of Melton, Victoria, Melton at a near equidistance to the major cities of Melbourne, Ballarat and Geelong. The population of the Bacchus Marsh urban area was 22,223 at June 2018. Bacchus Marsh is the largest urban area in the Local government in Australia, local government area of Shire of Moorabool. Traditionally a Market gardening, market garden area producing a large amount of the region's fruits and vegetables, in recent decades it has transformed into the main commuter town on the Melbourne-Ballarat, Victoria, Ballarat corridor. It was named after the colonial settler Captain William Henry Bacchus, who saw the great value of this locality as it was situated on two rivers — the Lerderderg River, Lerderderg and Werribee River, Werribee. History Aboriginal Bacchus Marsh is on the border ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
