Parts of southeastern Australia may have copped flooding rains this week, but there are already dire signs large parts of the country are heading headfirst toward drought.
The Bureau of Meteorology issued its latest drought statement this week, revealing that areas of rainfall deficiency have developed in every state and territory in the last five months.
Since May this year, deficiencies have developed across the country, with particularly large areas in Western Australia’s southwest and along a large stretch of the east coast.
Although large parts of the nation are unaffected – particularly central Australia – many of the worst deficiencies, as indicated by the darker red, are in critical food-growing areas and in the vicinity of capital cities and major water storage reservoirs.
“Storage levels remain low in some parts of southern and central Queensland, southeastern parts of New South Wales, central Tasmania, and urban areas of Perth,” the Bureau said in a statement.
The map comes after the Bureau declared September 2023 Australia’s driest on record (since 1900), with monthly rainfall 70.8 per cent below the 1961-1990 average across the nation.
Adding to concerns, particularly for growers, is that the monthly soil moisture was below average for much of Australia. The Bureau said soil moisture was in the lowest 30 per cent of all years since 1911.
And although this past week has brought significant rainfall to some parts of Australia’s southeast – following hours after bushfires burned hectares of scrub – only moderate amounts of rain fell in most of the rain-deficient areas.
The fire-affected Gippsland region and southeast Victoria experienced the highest levels of rain in the week to October 7 – as much as 200mm, according to the Bureau’s measurements.
Meanwhile, the much of New South Wales only saw about 25mm, and the rest of the country below 5mm.
It means last week’s rainfall event in the southeast has done very little to prevent drought developing further across the areas indicated by the Bureau, as we head into the first El Nino summer in three years.
The hotter and drier weather system has coincided with most of southeast Australia’s driest winter-spring periods and major droughts.
Worse, still, the Bureau warned, El Nino has combined with another climate driver: a positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) which may make the dry heat “stronger and more widespread”.
Looking ahead, the Bureau’s drought statement said below median rainfall is “likely to very likely” (at least 60 per cent, greater than 80 per cent) for much of western, northern, and southern Australia for November 2023 to January 2024.
That aligns with the warning that El Nino will likely continue until at least the end of our summer in February 2024.
However, in good news for northern New South Wales, small areas have a “slightly increased chance” of seeing above median rainfall in that same period.