Winter comes to summer

I know Canberra is supposed to be cold and wintery, but last night parts of the city had a big hailstorm which left the ground covered in ice, even well into this morning. It looked like the worst of winter had come, and its only just the end of summer.

It didn’t hail at my place … we just had a couple of hours of lightning and thunder, and half an hour or so when it pissed down raining.

So I didn’t see the hail and ice first hand, only heard about it on the radio this morning. It was amazing, knee deep hail on the ground which is something we’ve never had in our suburb - in fact I think we’ve had snow on the ground only 5 or so times while we’ve lived here, and hail probably only about a dozen times. The storm was heavy enough in the centre of Canberra to close a shopping mall for the day, as well as a university, schools and offices.

Plenty of people have blogged about the storm and put photos up - see here, here, here, here, here for some of them.

Technorati : Canberra, hailstorm, weather