Wet summer 2012-2013

It seems like it has been a very wet summer in the Berg this year. I have never seen the Injisuthi River quite as full as it was in Decemeber 2012 and a lot of the reports I've read show that other areas have been wet too - like this recently posted report of the Fangs valley in Mnweni
www.vertical-endeavour.com/forum/16-drakensberg-grand-traverse/55229-grand-traverse-blog.html

Here are some photos and some rainfall figures.




The rainfall plot above has two panels. The bottom panel shows the rainfall events and the top panel is the cumulative rainfall for the season. If the average rainfall were falling, then the green line would fall on the red diagonal line in the top panel. Instead we see that the green line is above the red line and this has been so since the start of Dec 2012. Cumulative rainfall has remained above average through the season. These data are from satellite derived rainfall estimates. The coords don't work perfectly for the Berg but other data I have seen show the whole area to have been very wet.

Here's a link to 15 minute satellite images for southern Africa from a project I run:
www.fennec.imperial.ac.uk/SA.shtml?date=2013/02/22 17:00&date2=2013/02/22 17:00
You can page forward and backward through the images at 15 minute, hourly or daily time slots.







This is a photo of Marble Baths. I've never seen it more full.





And the Delmhlwazini river flowing down from Cowl Fork was equally full.


as was the Injisuthi river.

In contrast 2011-2012 summer was very dry.


I noticed that there were many miggies in the lower Berg this year. I've not seen them before. And the report that Stijn posted on the Traverse (link earlier in this post) notes that there were Mozzies in the lower Berg of the Mnweni. The wet summmer must be related to this.

Interesting stuff.

Considering how flooded the Mlambonja River at Garden Castle was last year as well as the rivers that you cross near the Bushman's Nek border post - it makes sense...

Who has hiked in the Mnweni area in the past couple weeks? What is the state of the rivers there at the moment? Going up Rockeries (how much water?), coming down Mbundini having to cross the Mnweni river.

Would appreciate some feedback, thanks!

Meant to say that the Fennec website with the satellite imagery lags about 30 minutes behind real time (the time shown is UTC, which is offset from SA time by 2 hours at this time of the year). The images appear every 15 minutes and so you can see the weather building. Nice thunderstorms (the red cloud) over the northern Berg at the moment....

Sabine wrote: Who has hiked in the Mnweni area in the past couple weeks? What is the state of the rivers there at the moment? Going up Rockeries (how much water?), coming down Mbundini having to cross the Mnweni river.

Would appreciate some feedback, thanks!

from a quick spin through the satellite images on the Fennec site, the northern Berg has been clear of major storms for about 6 days - maybe more. That will bring the rivers down to reasonable levels but keep on eye on the storms building today.

Thanks for the link.

If you have trouble reaching the satellite imagery website from the link I posted, here is another (slightly longer) way:
go to
www.fennec.imperial.ac.uk/
The default choice is 'SEVIRI Dust' which will show a north African map.
To change this, go to the drop down list in the top right hand side, just underneath the yellow fox (fennec) and choose
SA
which is the second last one on the drop down list.
This should take you to the most recently available image with a UTC (GMT) time stamp for southern Africa. From there you can page backwards at 15 minute intervals to 1 June 2011 when the first images for the southern African sector were loaded to this website. It can be interesting to look back at the imagery for times when you were in the Berg.

JonWells wrote: @mnt_tiska, could you possibly explain the significance of the different colorations?

Probably the best way to explain these images is to make a few annotations on some typical snapshots and post them up here. I'll sort that out over the next few days.