Posts Tagged ‘Australian drought’

Drought in southern Australia declared ‘worst on record’

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

If you want to know what the U.S. southwest faces in the coming decades if we don’t reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends quickly, just look to Australia:

David Jones, the head of climate analysis at the Bureau of Meteorology, said the drought affecting south-west Western Australia, south-east South Australia, Victoria and northern Tasmania “is now very severe and without historical precedent”.

Dr Jones said Victoria had had “the driest multi-year period on record, but also by far the hottest….”

He said temperatures were running at about one degree “above any previous comparable drought. That is substantially hotter, and that one degree is a global warming signal.”

He said the data suggests that for every one degree of warming, there is a 15 per cent decline in run-off, or river flow, in the Murray Darling Basin….

He said a similar drying pattern had been observed in Europe’s Mediterranean, and the south-west in the USA….

The highlighted point is key. Previously, droughts around the world were either cold-whether droughts or warm-weather droughts. In the future, virtually all droughts will be hot weather droughts, which are obviously the worst kind.

He said the current dry was at the extreme end of what the climate models had predicted.

Most of the major predicted climate impacts the planet is now experiencing are at the extreme end of what the models had predicted (see “Are Scientists Overestimating — or Underestimating — Climate Change, Part I“).

More…

NSW drought area growing

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

More than 60 per cent of Australia’s main eastern agricultural state of New South Wales has slid back into drought after a dramatic increase in dry conditions in the past month, the state Government says.

Over the past month, drought grew to cover 62.7 per cent of the state, from 48.4 per cent a month earlier.

“Much of the cropping belt [is] on a knife edge waiting for desperately needed rain,” said the state Minister for Primary Industries, Ian Macdonald.

“All cropping areas are in urgent need of good rainfall to consolidate crops that have been sown and enable remaining seed to be planted.”

Areas that have slipped back into drought include key wheat growing areas in the central western parts of the state as well as the northern slopes and southern areas.

More…