How is this going to affect our weather moving forward?<\/p>\n
\u2014 Ashleigh<\/p>\n
Day to day, we’ll barely notice it.<\/p>\n
El Ni\u00f1o is a nudge on the weather, but one that adds up over time. Temperatures will be slightly warmer over winter ON AVERAGE \u2014 we’ll still get cold days and nights, but generally not quite as cold as they’d normally be.<\/p>\n
Similarly, there will be slightly less rain than normal ON AVERAGE \u2014 don’t put away your umbrella or gumboots but maybe think twice before having that super-long shower. Also, it might not make sense at first blush, but the reduced rainfall usually means clearer skies which \u2014 despite the slightly elevated temperatures \u2014 can mean more frosty mornings.<\/p>\n
Typically, El Ni\u00f1o lasts through winter and spring and starts to decay in summer, but they can last up to a year, and occasionally we can get subsequent back-to-back El Ni\u00f1o events for 2 years or more. That’s where things get really dangerous for Australia \u2014 multiple winters of low rainfall and warmer temperatures can significantly elevate the summer bushfire and drought risk.<\/p>\n
It can also reduce activity in the tropics later in the year (we typically end up with fewer cyclones than the average), and it can delay the onset of the northern wet season.<\/p>\n
The tricky thing is that no two El Ni\u00f1o events are the same \u2014 the weather is still the unknown variable with this climate push, and it just takes one wayward cyclone, deep cold front, or east coast low to change our fortunes significantly. To complicate things even further, there are other climate drivers \u2014 the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) and the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) that can sway the pendulum and either reinforce or combat El Ni\u00f1o.<\/p>\n
Finally, how we prepare and how we behave can change things too \u2014 good fuel reduction and land management policies, water conservation and disaster preparedness can take the sting out of the tail, buy us time, or at least help us recover more quickly when things get tough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How is this going to affect our weather moving forward? \u2014 Ashleigh Day to day, we’ll barely notice…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":743482,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,163268,61838,6045,59808,358105,358102,358103,358104,358106,44,292327,1192,358101],"class_list":["post-743481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australia-weather","tag-bom","tag-climate","tag-el-nino","tag-el-nino-australia","tag-el-nino-expert-qa","tag-el-nino-live-blog","tag-el-nino-weather-event","tag-how-will-el-nino-impact-australia","tag-news","tag-super-el-nino","tag-weather","tag-what-is-el-nino"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=743481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743481\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/743482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=743481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=743481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=743481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}