SA Footy

Since 1897 (and excluding 1916-18) here are the 10 wettest and driest footy seasons using the rainfall totals from the Adelaide weather stations - West Terrace until 1976 and Kent Town from 1977. The West Terrace station closed in 1980.

The rainfall figures are the total from April to September. Although of course in the earlier seasons, the season started in May, but I wanted to keep the months same throughout.
There are a number of variables, one is which that this rainfall doesn't indicated when during each week it fell, so it may not have had as much (or made more) impact than the figures show.
Also, the different venues - rainfall totals if kept at all league grounds would vary.

But this exercise was to give a rough idea only, and as you'll see, the years that do feature probably doesn't surprise:

Wettest Seasons
Year mm
1923 599.3
1992 544.4
1956 543.1
1909 517.7
1942 517.1
1971 514.3
1981 502.8
2001 498.8
1983 495.6
1932 483.8

Driest Seasons
Year mm
1959 139.0
1914 155.9
1967 175.4
1976 187.4
2006 193.6
1913 202.4
1949 205.5
1994 222.0
1977 225.8
1902 243.4

The year not seen in the wettest table would surprise (1968) had 365.8mm of rain between April and September. This would be an example I would imagine of when that rain fell, not so how much.

spell_check wrote:The year not seen in the wettest table would surprise (1968) had 365.8mm of rain between April and September. This would be an example I would imagine of when that rain fell, not so how much.

Yes, 1968 always sticks in my mind as the coldest and wettest winter in my memory. I think what happened there is it was just bitterly cold during the week, and then rained on the Saturday because it always seemed to be wet and muddy.

And I'd be surprised if there was a wetter Grand Final than 1970. Rain set in around 2am and never stopped. After playing U19s and Reserves, the Adelaide Oval was a quagmire for the League game. I remember it because I slept outside the oval the night before and looked like a drowned rat the next day.

I think you'll find most of the 544.4 mls in 1992 fell on grand final day

Nice post, Spelly.

Would it be possible to get day by day historical weather information from the Bureau? That would help to get a more accurate indication of how wet things were on game days.

Anything you don't keep stats on ?

Hows this year shaping up. Haven't had one wet day at the Footy this year yet....

I think you can Ecky, but you probably need to pay for that service - the BOM website is where I got that from, and it says something about a more complex kind of request would probably need some coin just so they can fill in a few fields on their search for it.

And SJABC, we have had 241.8mms since the start of April, up to 9am today.

This season is now up to 261.8mm of rainfall.

The total is now up to 286.8mm.

Compared to last season at the same time it was 274.4mm.

Ecky and others interested in this stuff, check this out:

http://www.australianweathernews.com/data/archive/23A/