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Australian Weather Calendar 2012

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More Galleries January: Double rainbow over Wombarra beach, New South Wales. Matt Smith, a warehouse supervisor of Wollongong, NSW, risked his $15,000 medium-format camera to capture this double rainbow at Wombarra beach in January 2011. It survived the rain. Rainbows are formed when light from the sun passes through raindrops in the atmosphere. As the light shines on the surface of the droplets, it is refracted, or bent. It then reflects off the back of the drop and is refracted again as it passes back through the surface of the droplet. Blue light refracts at a greater angle than red light, resulting in white light being separated into its spectrum of colours. A rainbow is an optical effect dependent on the position of the observer. If you travel towards a rainbow, it appears to move further away. Similarly, a rainbow viewed from above, such as from an aircraft, appears as a full circle rather than the semicircle when viewed from the ground. February: A dust storm descends on Warralong, northwest Western Australia. Suzanne Pollard, who calls herself 'a gypsy, a bush girl, a weather freak', was caretaking at an Aboriginal community at Warralong, 110 km southeast of Port Hedland, when she photographed this dust storm in January 2010. The strong and gusty winds associated with a thunderstorm picked up the loose red dust characteristic of the region. March: A flood palette, Channel Country, Queensland. Photographing from a mustering helicopter with doors removed, Helen Commens of Ourdel Station, near Windorah, Queensland, took this shot in December of the 2010-11 floods in the channel country. Frequent heavy rain in late 2010 - associated with a strong La Niña in the Pacific Ocean - led to widespread flooding across much of eastern Australia. La Niña, when sea-surface temperatures in the central/eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean are cooler than normal, usually results in increased rainfall across eastern Australia. In the week preceding the photograph, a low pressure trough over eastern Australia had directed a humid northerly airstream over central Queensland, leading to widespread rainfall.
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