The water off Crowdy Head has been amazingly cold - it seems to have been stuck around 16 deg since I first looked at the Manly Hydraulics Lab site about 2 months ago, apart from a couple a brief excursions towards 19-20. If I visit the area I don't think I'll be swimming in the ocean.

It would be interesting to see what the weather has been like at places like Harrington. Possibly often cool and foggy like Syndey beaches in early November? The nearest NSW 'coastal' stations shown on the BOM site - Taree Airport & Port Macquarie Airport - are some distance inland.

Sydney waters seem to have settled at their seasonal average of about 22 deg. I expect this means that sunny days with no strong general wind circulation will max out at a seasonal 24 - 26 deg near the coast.

Crowdy Head water temperature just getting worse and worse! It was below 14 degrees for a time yesterday. Has warmed up to 14.6 at the latest report.

Wow! I have never seen the water temperature this low, ever, off NSW.
11ºC in January!!

WTF? Hopefully the trend continues towards winter when the Tasman will freeze over and NSW is blanketed in a metre of snow.

Crowdy Head SST still gone crackers at 12 degrees this morning.

I wonder if there are any reports of hypothermia or cold shock heart attacks around Seal Rocks or Forster way.

im going to guess that the Crowdy head boy has been missreading for a while now. I could understand a day or two of 16c water mid summer, but this is just silly. Port Mac is not overly far from crowdy head and the water temp is 21c.

MHL shows that sea temperature off Sydney has dropped to 21 since the start of the month after being around 23 since mid January. I think it's too early and too big to be seasonal cooling, so I suppose this must be upwelling.

Crowdy head has consistently been in the mid teens for months, so as Enrique says, it must be misreading (unless its measuring deeper water).

Some big fluctuations in SST off Sydney over the last couple of days - 17 deg to 24.


SST 120402 by Stevevii77, on Flickr

hmm thats pretty odd, must be a little bit of localised upwelling offshore or an error ( Swell readings are missing from the same time as those dips). Im in the newcastle region and near shore temps were buitiful on fri/sat mornings.

The Sydney bouy must be catching the western edge of that large anticlockwise eddy.
Water temperature now 24-25°C in the brine off Sydney.

The new mhl site is loading veeeeeery slowly for me. They may have to tweak this page - http://new.mhl.nsw.gov.au/data/realtime/sst/Sydney as the image is cut off at the right where the temperature is shown. You have to right click > View image to be able to see the temperature.

Enrique,those water temps sound good,iam having three weeks at Corlette in May GDL

Looks like MHL has fixed the SST measuring device off Crowdy Head (near Port Macquarie, NSW). Looks quite warm for this time of year, but now seems reasonably consistent with Coffs Harbour and Sydney:


crowdy_temp by Stevevii77, on Flickr

Manly Hydraulics have added 3 temperature bouys to the NSW coast.
http://new.mhl.nsw.gov.au/data/realtime/sst/

That makes 7 locations once the troublesome Crowdy Head gets back online.

Crowdy head is still offline

Looks like SST's have climbed in the last few weeks, now around 21c in the Newcastle region, just need some good surf to go along with it.

The mainly association in the ocean of upwellings is with the divergence of currents the purpose of which is to bring deeper and colder and some kind of rich waters to its surface.

Check out some of the temperature drops off NSW - http://new.mhl.nsw.gov.au/data/realtime/sst/.

In less than a week -
Crowdy Head: 26 > 17
Coffs Harbour: 26 > 17
Byron Bay: 27 > 20

A disaster!

hopefully it should rebound pretty quick now that the storm system has moved on.

I suppose it depends on how far off shore the influx iof freshwater pushes. Rivers like the clarence will pump enough fresh out of them too push the warmer currents quite a few miles out.

I see that Sydney Morning Herald's weather section (provided by weatherzone) states that the water temp in Sydney is 26.1°. Impressive.
A bit of snooping on the MHL site shows this occurred at midday yesterday. So I guess that is when weatherzone source their stats for Sydney sea temps.

Most of the NSW coast is enjoying SST around 25° now. Only the south coast is shivering in miserable sub 20° brine.

Sounds great Kizz, let’s hope the inshore temps are just as warm! My understanding is the buoy is about 13km offshore of the northern beaches, if I’m not mistaken.