Daintree, Mossman rivers among flood watch in next few days
Big Wet
The Daintree and Mossman rivers are amongst a raft of far north catchment areas under an initial flood watch issued by the Bureau of Meteorology over the next few days.
The local disaster management group Douglas Disaster Information has activated the BoM bulletin on its social media page – saying severe thunderstorms with heavy to intense rainfall are possible in parts of the far north and north from today.
These conditions are likely to continue over the next several days.
Community Information Officer at the BoM, Patch Clapp, told Newsport a short time ago that the ground is already wet from recent heavy rainfall in many areas.
“It is possible that just with how saturated all the soils are across the north after the last couple of weeks, that wherever rain does fall, things will probably respond quite quickly,” Mr Clapp said.
“So that’s both the creeks and rivers but also around roads and around homes and that sort of thing, and we could see some inundation of roads for brief periods of time.”
The expected weather is being brought on by both a broad low system of moist air, and also the redevelopment of the north’s monsoon trough, which frequently spawns individual low pressure systems, producing heavy rain and flooding.
Areas of heavy rainfall are likely from late Friday and expected to become more widespread from Saturday.
At this stage, the Bureau says there is some uncertainty over the location of the heaviest rainfall and therefore which catchments are most at risk of flooding.
Heavy rainfall, possibly intense at times, may cause localised flooding. Disruption to transport routes is likely across parts of the Flood Watch area.
Read more at: http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/wrap_fwo.pl?IDQ20900.html.