An almost 45-degree difference in just three months

The whiplash-inducing extremes of the city's climate have been on full display in recent months thanks to a summer that bled into autumn and a particularly brutal opening month of winter.

The temperature at the Bathurst Airport weather station (where the figures are more complete than at the ag station) has ranged from an unseasonable 36.6 degrees in mid-March to a Siberian -7.5 in mid-June.

That's an almost 45-degree spread in the space of just three months.

The 36.6-degree day on March 19 was almost 12 degrees higher than the long-term mean maximum at the airport and last month's -7.5-degree morning was almost 10 degrees lower than the average mean minimum.

That's a lot for a gardener - and a garden - to bear.

For another example of the city's climatic variability, the airport weather station recorded just over 110 millimetres of rain in March, less than half of that in April and just under 10mm in May.

While autumn and winter this year is turning on the extremes, it was spring and summer in 2019 that did the same.

There were reports of snow and ice on the road at Yetholme in early October that year, creating an unwelcome hazard for the race fans making their way to the Bathurst 1000.

Two-and-a-bit months later, it was 30 degrees at 10am and 38 degrees at 2pm as a December maximum temperature record toppled for the city.

Bathurst wasn't to know it at the time, as the city sweltered through an un-tablelands-like summer and the region was wreathed in bushfire smoke, but the long-running drought was soon to break.