News and updates from Paul and Cathy Middleton, serving in southern Africa.

23 January 2012

Weather

There is only one cyclone/hurricane/typhoon active on the whole globe at the moment. Unfortunately it's in our back yard.

Occasionally we have to delay a trip for a few hours due to early morning fog. Once or twice we've had to divert to another airport due to bad weather. It's not often, though, that we postpone a whole flight altogether.

Right now I was expecting to be in the village of Nensa on the banks of the Zambezi with an education development team, but instead I am sat at home in South Africa typing this update.

The last entry below detailed some weather that we had about a week ago that affected us in the east of South Africa. It seems that when that dissipated some of the moisture got sucked into another depression that was developing off the coast to the north of Mozambique and the result was another more powerful cyclone, misleadingly called Funso.
To give you an idea, two of the boxes on the map above are a little further than the length of the UK.

Currently Funso is a Category 3 cyclone but is forecast to develop into a Category 4 tomorrow (Katrina in the US a few years ago was a Category 5). Here's a map that shows rain intensity. Basically as you can see from the key, all the pinks and purples are as about as heavy rain as you can get.
The next two maps shows how quick it developed and are two days apart from each other.

All is not entirely lost though.

Mercy Air has a working relationship with a number of aid organisations (CARE, OXFAM etc) based in Maputo and we are on call to assist with natural disasters of varying magnitudes. The rain we had last week has now made it's way into the river systems and the levels are currently peaking in the lower Limpopo River Basin. They have asked us to do some survey flights to assess the situation and Paul will likely fly over early on Wednesday morning to take various NGO representatives to have a closer look.

My guess is that will be the subject of the next blog.

Paul and Cathy

18 January 2012

Rain Rain Everywhere

We've been to help in other areas a number of times when they have been hit by flooding, but now we have our very own storm come to visit us.
It is called Cyclone Dando and developed last week between Madagascar and Mozambique. It is only a category one storm but it has been raining hard continuously here for three days now and we've had the same amount of rain in three days as we usually get in the whole of January - which in itself is one of the wettest months.

Here's a pic of one of the rivers in the nearby Kruger Park.
Mercy Air has had it's issues with the weather as two large trees on the farm fell down last night, one narrowly missing the Ziessler's house.
At least we'll be alright for fire wood this winter!

I think we're due to get one more day of rain before things start to clear up. It's just like Britain!

However, one article suggests that moisture from Dando could get sucked into another depression that is forming off the coast to the north of Mozambique and create a new cyclone. This would be particularly worrying as Paul is flying a team up there this coming Monday.

Paul and Cathy