March madness: Records tumble, less rain and ... where was our snow?

Orange's year of sun and rain (albeit much less than the last few years) is in the books for 2023.

For the first time in three years Orange received less than average rainfall throughout a calendar year, but the average temperature for the city was up significantly.

Since 1966, the Orange Agricultural Institute weather station has received an average of 925.7mm of rain and averaged a top temperature of 18 degrees.

The Bureau of Meteorology's final reading of 2023 has the city's rainfall total at 829mm for the 12 months throughout 2023.

While our average top temperature for 2023 was 19.15 degrees.

Our wettest month was March when 183mm was recorded. Orange also recorded its wettest day of the year in March. A total of 65.2mm fell in the 24-hour period to 9am on March 27.

Just three months of the year - March, April and November - passed 100mm mark for rain total. When we were drenched by record rain in 2021, six months of the year passed that mark, including a 300-plus-mm month in November that year.

Our hottest day of the year was 34.5 on March 19. That scorcher will go down as Orange's hottest March day in over 50 years, too.

While our coldest day was an absolutely freezing start in June. The minus 6.6 degrees recorded on the morning of June 21 is one of the city's coldest starts in recent memory.

In September, the bureau declared Australia had entered two climate phenomena El Nino and a positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IDO). That declaration meant Australia was in for some very hot and dry conditions over this summer.

In Orange, we'd seen that hot, dry weather creep in since July.

July, 2023 was Orange's hottest on record with an average top temperature of 12 degrees, well up on the 9.6 long-term average.

And that trend continued throughout the rest of the year, too. Orange's maximum temperatures were all above average for the remained of the year.

September endured the biggest leap of 2.5 degrees, with an average top of 17.8 degrees to begin spring in the colour city - significantly up from the long-term average of 14.3 degrees.

Nation wide,

The BoM released its climate statement for Australia in December 2023, and it was the nation's hottest fourth-hottest December on record, in records going back to 1910.

Orange's average top temperature for December was above that again. At 26.4 degrees for 2023 a jump of 2.1 degrees was experienced in Orange - higher than the national average.

Unlike the 2021 calendar year where Orange recorded its best snowfall in 40 years, the snow report for 2023 is fairly grim, with no notable dustings throughout winter.