Sydney Climate

The Australian climate

Australia lies between 10° and 39° south of the equator, so it is partly in the tropics, and mainly in the temperate zone. The Sydney Calendar will give you an idea of what to expect in New South Wales, and you will find details for other parts of Australia on the Bureau of Meteorology site at http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/ which has more detail than anybody could ever want.

With the exception of Antarctica, no continent has less liquid water than Australia. Rather than having seasons, Australia has a staggering hiccoughing cycle of El Niño events, with droughts and flooding rains, such as Dorothea Mackellar describes in My Country. One of the long-standing themes in Australian rural culture is a hatred of "the Banks", much of it stemming from the way in which banks lend money on an annual basis, and repossess properties when the money cannot be paid back until the end of that particular drought cycle.

About 70% of the continent is classified as arid or semi-arid, and eleven large deserts make up about 20% of the mainland. These are not "deserts" in the popular image of featureless sand, but rather, they are sandy or stony, but they also carry plants and animals, and after rain, they can be breathtakingkly beautiful, but Australia's deserts are not a place to stray on your own.

Across the continent, the average rainfall is a mere 465 mm, about 15 inches, as low as 125 mm (5 inches) in the Lake Eyre drainage basin. Western NSW can record temperatures over 50° C (122° F), and the highest ever recorded was 53° C (128° F) at Cloncurry in 1889. The coldest temoperature ever recorded was -23° C at Charlotte Pass near Mount Kosciuszko in 1994.

While it can snow in January near Cradle Mountain in Tasmania, and while you may need a sweater on the Great Barrier Reef in July, most parts of Australia are pleasant and predictable most of the time.

The Sydney climate

Because Sydney's coastal suburbs are surrounded by seawater, temperature conditions are buffered, and sea breezes keep the hot days cool. Head out west, even a few kilometres, and the extremes are greater. You won't see snow in Sydney, and even frosts are rare near the coast.

Historically, we average a metre of rain, 40 inches, each year, but few years are average years. There is no rainy season, and the rain usually goes quickly, but sudden storms can be common, and "showers" means downpors in some places and nothing a few hundred metres away. Learn to live with it.

Sydney is in the southern hemisphere: if you are from the northern hemisphere, remember that the seasons are reversed. Our hottest months are December to February, during the southern summer. Our flowers largely ignore the seasons, so you can usually see about 30 species in flower as you walk along a suburban street, and at least that number species of wildflower can be in bloom any time from May to December, with a few less in January-April. The best time for wildflowers is in August, when a walk over a headland can reveal 60 species in bloom.

Temperatures

The nearer you are to the sea, the more stable the temperature becomes. The heat is taken out of the worst heat wave by the gentle sea-breeze, and a frost within several kilometres of the sea is an unusual event. The temperature scale in common use is the Celsius scale, often referred to as the Centigrade scale. If you prefer the Fahrenheit scale, divide by 5, multiply by 9, and add 32, or use this rule of thumb: 0° is freezing, 10° is chilly, 20° is comfortable, 30° is getting warm, 40° is a heat wave.

In summer, the temperature can reach the high 30s on a bad day, and will occasionally drop down to 17 at night, but the summer temperatures are more typically somewhere in the twenties.

In winter, the temperature can go as low as 5 degrees, with a wind chill factor on top of that, and reach freezing away from the coast. Even so, a winter's day when the temperature fails to reach 15 degrees is a cause for grumbling. The temperature, in other words, is generally mild. If you need to wear a coat, be prepared to take it off later, and if it isn't coat weather, it might be handy to carry something warm, as you may need it later, especially if a southerly change comes in.