El Niño looming large this summer, now we have to understand drought

W

ith an El Niño looming large this summer, it is very likely we will start to hear quite a bit about drought over the coming months.

Inevitably, at some point you will hear someone say that the warmer temperatures are making the drought worse. This is guaranteed to cause confusion because it’s not actually how droughts work.

For a drought-prone country, it is quite surprising how few Australians really understand them. Most believe it is a simple equation: rainfall goes down and the temperature rises, leading to more evaporation and an increasingly parched landscape.

But the truth is much more interesting and complex, and the idea that increased evaporation is responsible for common droughts is completely wrong. In fact the issue of how droughts develop is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation.

The first part of the general idea about drought – that it is kicked off by a decline in rainfall – is correct. But it is the cascading set of changes that occur after this that are often misunderstood.

Read the piece on The Conversation by a professor at the  Research School of Earth Sciences and the Research School of Biology at the Australian National University,  Professor Michael Roderick - “El Niño is here and that means droughts, but they don’t work how you might think.”