Dr Karl Kruszelnicki has explained when the wet weather is expected to end – and that’s not good news.
Why was there so much rain?
The first reason is “hot water evaporates more than colder water”.
Australia is surrounded by pools of warm water, so assuming it evaporates faster, we are more likely to experience it when it comes down.
“In Australia we have two hot water basins against our coast, La Nina on our east coast and on the west coast we have what they call the Indian Ocean Dipole and that’s warm so it’s evaporates,” Dr. Karl said.
Then there is also the southern annular mode which Dr. Karl explained as being a group of cyclones “continuously revolving around the South Pole”.
“When they’re nice and warm you get blizzards over Antarctica, when they come out you get cold weather patterns moving across Australia,” he said.
This can cause a low-pressure system to move north to Australia, which can then collide with a high-pressure system before moving seaward, creating an atmospheric river.
An atmospheric river refers to long, narrow regions in the atmosphere that act like a river carrying large amounts of water vapor.
Dr Karl said this atmospheric river was behind the downpour in Brisbane and the devastating floods that followed earlier this year.
“It dumped eight cubic kilometers of water over Brisbane in three days,” he said.
He added that this is the equivalent of 16 Sydney ports.
Dr Karl was not shy about being the bearer of bad news with the heavy rains set to continue until at least June, and it could get worse before it gets better.
“We’re stuck in the short term with a few months,” he said.
“It looks like it’s going to get worse.
“Maybe until June, then things are up in the air.”
This means Australians could face wet weather for much of this year as experts also predict La Nina won’t be going away anytime soon.
“La Niña has a 59% chance of continuing through the Southern Hemisphere winter and a 50-55% chance of persisting through the Southern Hemisphere spring,” Weatherzone said, referring to forecasts from the Center for Climate Prediction (CPC) from the US National Weather Service. and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University.
What can we do to change it?
Dr Karl said the reason for these intense weather systems that bring unpredictable weather patterns is global warming.
“We can stop and reverse the global warming that is causing it, we can reduce our carbon emissions by 95% in 10 years if we choose to,” he said.
“Whether we decide to do it or not depends on the influence of the fossil fuel companies.
“We can reverse global warming and bring temperatures back to where they were in the 20th century.”
Cities cut off by floodwaters for second time this year
