This is a comic that was drawn based on the early days of the forum and what happened when the first big snow storms of the season arrived (yes that is Ian D and Richard). It isn't a problem anymore. A bit of trivia, if you hear someone refer to something being "Hammoed" it's referring to the artist of the cartoon, and something going very wrong with the forum software/server
That is an absolute classic, . I have no doubt that Ski’s server will be able to keep up, it was us and the Mods that couldn’t keep up A classic was Cyclone Yasi. If you took a quick break, then went to posts some obs, there was 10+ new pages to try and speed read. We actually crashed WZ a few times. But that was an antiquated old system. This forum is far more superior to what we had. WZ gave up on us some time back then gave us very short notice they were dumping us. Cheers Col.
Could the sub forums be Alpine and Southern (below 33ish degrees) The In Betweeny Bits Cyclones and Northern And then just make threads as relevant?
Righto, here's my take on this situation; first and foremost, let us begin with the most splendorous Angler's Latitudinal Parallel Classification (Southern Hemisphere) system: I. Equatorial = 0.0°-9.5° S II. Tropical = 10.0°-23.5° S III. Subtropical = 24.0°-34.5° S IV. Lower Mid-Latitudinal = 35.0°-39.5° S V. Upper Mid-Latitudinal = 40.0°-44.5° S VI. Subpolar = 45.0°-55.5° S VII. Outer Polar = 56.0°-69.5° S VIII. Inner Polar = >70.0°(-90.0°) S Thereby, we can gather the following: Tropics Forum = Central to Northern QLD; Northern WA; Central to Northern NT Subtropics Forum = Southern QLD; Central to Northern NSW; Central WA; Northern SA; Southern NT Southern Forum = Southern NSW & ACT; VIC; TAS; Southern WA; Central to Southern SA
As it is now with it simply as “eastern” is probably better than subtropics IMO. Central NSW would at different times be influenced by weather that could easily be classified as temperate or subtropics. Also splitting by latitude alone does not represent the differences we see between west and east. The differences between east and west are not often very significant for summer cyclones and monsoons in the north, but are more significant in other seasons and south of Tropic of Capricorn such as north west cloud bands (west) and ECLs (east).
It seems to me there are two opposite views. WZ folks seem to be keen on location centric views. Whereas the ski folk tend to be system or event focused. Both are valid and both are needed. If you use more system based focus the importance of the division or definition of the locations for location focus become less relevant and can become more user friendly rather than some arcane or jargonistic breakup.
.... and I think there's a reason. So far, we've only seen location based posting from ex-WZ people, because from their POV, nothing "interesting" has happened. Snow on the southern mountains is nothing special, so WZ people will continue to post about their local area. OTOH, for the bulk of the posters here at ski.com.au, snow is the MAIN attraction and interest, so snow on the mountains is special, interesting and the MAIN point about being interested, for a site that was originally created for snow sports. Most of MY interest in weather was spawned from the how and why of snow..... I mean, I wanted to know WHY back in 1984, so I took temperature, pressure and snow depth records from then until 1996, to understand how and why snow fell.... and consequently sparked my interest in ALL weather. Therefore, for the bulk of the time, observable localised weather is the primary focus for ex-WZ. I'm 100% sure most ex-WZ people will be very event focused is there's a big TC, or an ECL, etc.
Being as 'Subtropics' has been deprecated in favor of 'Eastern' I think we can safely call the debate over. Locking thread.