Droughts and flooding rains: it takes three oceans to explain Australia’s wild 21st-century weather.

Green plant growth across Australia,
compiled via satellite observations. 

Australia is a land of extremes, and famously of “droughts and flooding rains”. That’s been truer than ever in the 21st century; since 1999 the country has see-sawed from drought to deluge with surprising speed.

There was the millennium drought, which lasted more than a decade and culminated in disasters such as Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires in 2009. Then, in 2011, Cyclone Yasi struck Queensland and a large swathe of Australia exploded under a green carpet of grasses, shrubs and trees.

Filming of the movie Mad Max: Fury Road was moved from outback Australia to Namibia after the big wet of 2010-11, because Australia’s luxurious growth of wildflowers and metre-high grasses didn’t quite match the post-apocalyptic landscape the movie’s producers had in mind. 

In Alice Springs, the Henley-on-Todd Regatta was almost cancelled in 2011 because there was water in the normally dry river.

Read the piece on The Conversation by a Research fellow in environmental sciences from the University of Technology Sydney,  James Cleverly, and Derek Eamus, also from Sydney’s University of Technology - “Droughts and flooding rains: it takes three oceans to explain Australia’s wild 21st-century weather.”