"Weatherlawyer" wrote in message
...
| WHILE the Top End and Central Australia have been battered by
| torrential rains, a Territory town has had fish falling from the sky.
|
| The freak phenomena happened not once, but twice, on Thursday and
| Friday afternoon about 6pm at Lajamanu, about 550km southwest of
| Katherine.
|
| "It rained fish in Lajamanu on Thursday and Friday night," she said,
| "They fell from the sky everywhere. "Locals were picking them up off
| the footy oval and on the ground everywhere.
|
| "These fish were alive when they hit the ground." [That's always the
| way of it.]
|
| Lajamanu sits on the edge of the Tanami Desert, hundreds of kilometres
| from Lake Argyle and Lake Elliott and even further from the coast. But
| it's not the first time the remote community has been bombarded by
| fins from above.
|
| In 2004, locals reported fish falling from the sky, and in 1974, a
| similar incident captured international headlines.
|
| The small white fish are believed to be spangled perch, which are very
| common through much of northern Australia.
|
| Weather bureau senior forecaster Ashley Patterson said the geological
| conditions were perfect on Friday for a tornado in the Douglas Daly
| region.
| [I like this man's thinking.]
|
| He said it would have been an ideal weather situation to allow the
| phenomena to occur - but no tornados have been reported to the
| authority.
|
| "It's a very unusual event," he said. "With an updraft, (fish and
| water picked up) could get up high - up to 60,000 or 70,000 feet.
|
| "Or possibly from a tornado over a large water body - but we haven't
| had any reports," he said.
|
| Loads more good stuff on he
| http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/c/sc...oring-enigmas/
|

I have been to that part of Australia and it's pretty remote. It would be
more remarkable if a tornado *had* been spotted, there being so much Outback
for the tornado to visit and so few people to see it.

If the fish were still alive when they hit the ground, it is extremely
unlikely they went up to 60 000 or 70 000 feet - that's about twice as high
as the summit of Mt Everest and the temperature at a tropopause that high
would surely be somewhere around -70C to -80C. Knock a "nought" off the end
and we have a rather more credible scenario for a survivable voyage. Having
said that, I believe there was an incident once when a pilot had to bale out
of his aircraft in a thunderstorm and the updraught caught his parachute,
taking him up to somewhere between 20 000 and 30 000 feet and turning him
into a kind of giant hailstone.
--
- Yokel -

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