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Just wondering, since it seems like much of northern Australia has an actual monsoon climate.
Arizona experiences a build up of humidity, wind and rain in July that locals call the monsoon, but parts of Australia have an even more stereotypically monsoonal climate (from looking at stats for a place like Darwin) so I was wondering if any Aussies think of their climate in the same way too, as "monsoonal".
Yes, it is monsoonal. It's common referred to as the wet season or the 'Wet'. Aborigines though have a more complex idea of seasons related to the availability of food sources. Like in some areas they might have say six distinct seasons.
Colloquially in the NT it's usually referred to as "The Wet" and "The Dry" for the seasons as a whole (plus "The Build-up"). Monsoon usually refers to the specific periods of the active monsoon [1], ie the times when it's overcast and rains pretty well all the time. It's common to see references to "monsoonal showers" on the weather forecast at these times.
[1] The Australian monsoon has two types of activity - active periods when the monsoon is "in", and inactive or break periods when you get the classic sunny mornings with afternoon thunderstorms. There's usually 3-4 active monsoons a season, about a month apart, lasting for 1-2 weeks at a time. Though I recall one time when two active monsoon periods blended into each other and it pretty much rained solidly for three weeks.
We've got "the wet" now good and proper, a long monsoon trough came down the coast last week dragging ex tropical cyclone Marcia in its tail. I tell you, when it rains here boy does it rain and it's warm too! Of course being summer everything grows like mad, my DH is cutting the grass once every 5 days atm. It's exhausting watching him
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