Brace yourself Australia as the country is bound to become an oven over this weekend with temperatures soaring to even more than 50 degree Celsius as per the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). Saturday the 11th of February could well be the hottest day of the season in this Victorian land. The all time previous record was 46.5 degrees Celsius at Ballera in Southwest Queensland in 2006.
A number of towns in southern Queensland had their temperatures spiked at above 40 degree Celsius today, including Ballera and Thargomindah, which both reached nearly 46 degree Celsius, and Birdsville who was swelteringly hot at 45 degree Celsius. The population is being warned all over the continent as the temperatures continue to rise and people see power cuts and intense heatwave take over. Firefighters have been spending the night monitoring hot spots after a grass fire at Diggers Rest, in Melbourne’s North West broke out. Not only this, even pointers to the people to keep their pets safe have been given. The owners are being told to be careful especially with these successive hot days and not to dismiss all signs as just heat related.
Unfortunately, BOM forecaster Sam Campbell said there would not be relief from the heat until early next week. “The air mass is quite humid. It’s going to limit the degree of cooling. Conditions as we try to sleep are going to be quite stifling. In terms of the Southeast, we’re likely to see a south-easterly change on Monday but it’s not until Tuesday that we’re likely to see things return to average,” he said. Making matters worse, more than 40,000 homes were without power for more than half an hour after SA Power Networks was instructed to begin load shedding because of a lack of available generation.
But this heatwave also provides an ample opportunity to tap into the solar energy as per the University of Queensland professor, Simon Bartlett. “The high saturation of rooftop household solar across southeast Queensland may reduce the overall load on the power network. The combined solar capacity in southeast Queensland is about 1,300 – 1,500 megawatts, which is the sort of power you get from a large central power station,” he said. Hopefully the Australian can make a good thing out of the giant heatwave rolling across Australia right now.
