davidcook

So, back in this post in September 2011, I wrote that I was worried we were slipping back into an El Niño cycle, which generally leads to reduced rainfall along the east coast of Australia (which sometimes leads to drought conditions).
History will show that I was completely wrong, and we had one of the wettest summers and autumns ever after that. Oops.

Anyway, I'm going to try again, this time from a cosy position in January ...

Now, it's not just that we've had a bit of a heatwave across the southeastern side of Oz recently (highest temperature I saw[1] was 48.2 at a South Australian town called Wudinna - oddly enough, not all that far from Thevenard, where I spent my first two years), but rainfall is down.

Melbourne has only had 30-40mm in each of the last four months, and none of the big downpours that are usually part of the spring/summer cycle around here. It hasn't rained since the 22nd of December, our water tanks are running low (they get used for laundry and toilet-flushing too), and the garden is suffering.
What I'd expect is that once or twice a month, we'd get a string of days getting hotter, leading to a humid day with a top somewhere around 35-40, then a big thunderstorm would roll through and drench everything.
Instead, we're getting plenty of Adelaide-like dry hot days, sometimes followed by a cool change, but not the rain.

So far, the Bureau of Meteorology have (as far as I've seen) been cautious about declaring the return of El Niño - the last news item I saw suggested that they'd seen it start to form, then reverse itself.

But I'm going to declare it: El Niño is back.
Time to break out the drought-resistant gardens again, rather than the deluge-resistant ones we've needed for the past couple of years.


[1] Excluding the 54.9 recorded at a Tasmanian town when the bushfire passed through the other day, though.