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| The attitude required to get through our hottest and driest year on record. (ABCMyPhoto: Clancy Paine) |
It wasn't just hot and dry, it smashed the records.
Australia's average maximum daytime temperatures really sizzled — last year was 2.09 degrees Celsius above the 1961-to-1990 average, smashing the previous record by half a degree.
Dr Karl Braganza, the Bureau of Meteorology's head of climate monitoring, said it was the first time an annual anomaly had been two degrees above average.
Annual mean temperatures were also the highest on record for the country as a whole, at 1.52C above average.
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| There has been a clear upward trend in average temperatures over the past century. (Supplied: Bureau of Meteorology) |
Dry years are often hot because rain cools things down, but this is the first time a year has been both the hottest and driest on record.
The previous driest year was 1902, at the end of the federation drought and before the official temperature record began.
2019 wasn't all fire
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| In Melawondi, near Kandanga and Imbil on the Sunshine Coast, residents collected hailstones in buckets. (Supplied: Bobbie Hamilton) |
It has been estimated 664,000 cattle died when floodwaters covered much of the Channel and Gulf country.
The on-flow ended with the ephemeral Lake Eyre reaching 65 per cent capacity, its fullest since 2011.
Then, dust storm after dust storm swept across the country along with a number of storm storms that caused havoc — from wrecking the vineyards of South Australia's Riverland to pelting down 11-centimetre hail in Queensland's Wide Bay region.
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| Widespread snowfall in August feels like a lifetime ago. (ABCMyPhoto: Ross Long) |
Doesn't August feel like a lifetime ago?
But yes, the main story of 2019 was the heat and the fires.
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| The 2019-20 fire season will forever go down in the record books. (ABCMyPhoto: Martin Von Stoll) |
Fires burned through Tasmania for weeks, resulting in the state's worst fire season since 1967.
There were also major blazes in Victoria and Western Australia early in the year, only for that devastation to be eclipsed by the recent horror fires.
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| 2019's rainfall was below that of even the millennium drought years. (Supplied: Bureau of Meteorology) |
On December 17 and then 18, Australia surpassed its hottest day on record — the 19th only missed out on the hat-trick by a whisker.
By the end of December, the BOM's report states more than 5 million hectares have been burnt across Australia since July.
"The extensive long-lived fires appear to be the largest in scale in the modern record in New South Wales, while the total area burnt appears to be the largest in a single recorded fire season for eastern Australia," it said.
Yes, climate change is involved
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| The majority of Australia recorded rainfall well below average during 2019. (Supplied: Bureau of Meteorology) |
Both contributed to the hot dry conditions, but this natural variability happens on the foundation of rising temperatures and increasing fire danger for Australia, Dr Braganza said.
"We've got very-well-defined and clear trends, underlying the change that we've seen over the past several decades," he said.
"We've seen clear trends in maximum, minimum and average temperatures across Australia.
"We've seen quite clear trends in reducing rainfall across south-west WA and parts of the south-east."
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| Red regions indicate where fire weather increased between 1978 and 2017. (Supplied: Bureau of Meteorology ) |
"The fire season has extended by months in some locations, particularly along the south coast and east Gippsland.
"We're getting more fire weather during the season, and the fire weather we're seeing is more severe."That's reflected in heatwaves as well in many parts of the continent."
The year that will be
How 2020 will follow is yet to be determined, but that underlying trend is not going away.
The current outlook is for relatively neutral conditions; the positive IOD broke down as the monsoon moved into the Australian region.
But that doesn't mean we are out of the woods.The #IndianOceanDipole (IOD) has returned to neutral, indicating the end of one of the strongest positive IOD events to impact Australia in recent history—a key driver of the warm & dry conditions during the second half of 2019. Read more in #ENSO Wrap-Up: https://t.co/Eq0Mz3VDnZ pic.twitter.com/Q52oaFG5iw— Bureau of Meteorology, Australia (@BOM_au) January 8, 2020
"We're not seeing an indication of odds favouring a lot of widespread, above-average rainfall, but we are seeing indications of some rainfall starting to come in with the northern monsoon," Dr Braganza said.
"The hope is that they start to cool down parts of the continent over the central and north-west, which tends to assist in cooling temperatures down a little.
"But really, it's been very hot and dry already. It's still the start of January, there is a deal of summer to go."
Rain and cyclones might finally be coming in the north, but the call is to remain vigilant as the traditionally hottest months of summer are still to come.
Links
- 2019 was Australia's hottest and driest year on record
- Cattle, infrastructure losses following Queensland floods could near $2b, farm lobby says
- How did the massive hailstones that fell over southern Queensland form?
- The Hawks and the Giants played AFL in the snow, but was it the first time ever?
- Australia swelters through its hottest month on record, with January mean temperature exceeding 30C
- A positive Indian Ocean Dipole this winter is bad news for drought-hit parts of Australia
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