Does Australia need to define a new climate reality for itself?Australia is experiencing a widespread drying trend that is blurring the distinction between ‘drought’ and ‘aridity’.

Words such as ‘extreme’ and ‘recordbreaking’ are now used to describe long dry periods, but at what point does our understanding of what is and isn’t a drought need to change? These policy settings provide a good indicator of how it’s adapting its thinking about the drying climate.However, ‘drought’ and ‘aridity’ seem to be used interchangeably in government planning and scientific reports. The Millennium Drought was a prolonged period of dry conditions occurring in much of southern Australia from late-1996 to mid-2010 (Bureau of Meteorology 2015b). Our reconstruction also shows that the most intense droughts described in the historical records – the Settlement Drought (1790-93), Sturt’s Drought (1809–30), and the Goyder Line Drought (1861–66) – were limited to specific regions. Write an article and join a growing community of more than 110,800 academics and researchers from 3,638 institutions.

From 1999-2012 we were in a negative phase of the IPO; now it appears we have just entered a strongly positive phase.You may have noticed that the Millennium Drought happened in a negative IPO phase.

Maintaining this differentiation between the two terms is becoming more difficult: some parts of Australia have been in ‘drought’ since 2013.

Australia is the land of drought and flooding rains, and in a The data reveal that despite the severity of the Millennium Drought, the five worst single years of drought happened before 1900.

The existing drought records are relatively short and geographically patchy. Chris Turney receives funding from the Australian Research Council.Jonathan Palmer receives funding from Australian Research Council. ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor of Earth Sciences and Climate Change, UNSW The early colony was fortunate to survive.An obvious question is how do our modern droughts and floods stack up against earlier events? The IPO tells us when we have unexpectedly warmer or cooler sea surface temps and air pressures. For example, trees grow less in dry years and more in wet years. The government’s drought plan recognises that farmers ‘operate in a largely arid continent’. Maintaining this differentiation between the two terms is becoming more difficult: some parts of Australia have been in ‘Drought and aridity constitute different problems that require very different policy responses. The atlas also provides new geographical context for early historical droughts. We found short droughts of brutal intensity that blanketed all of eastern Australia, while other droughts of similar intensity were confined to small pockets across the continent. Copyright © 2020Getting real about drought and climate change in Australia Our data show that there is a strong relationship between the phases of the IPO and drought - until around 1976.

2013 ). A drought is temporary, while aridity is a permanent feature of the natural landscape. The dominant theme of Australia’s drought history is variability. ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor of Silviculture and Forest Ecology, University of Melbourne But to discover details about rainfall history and drought cycles in more recent times, Patrick also needed cores from lakes on land. For example, diaries from early settlers near Sydney documented a crippling drought in 1791-92.

For Southeast Australia, we show here that the ``Big Dry'' and other iconic 20th Century droughts, including the Federation Drought (1895-1902) and World War II drought … Or in extreme circumstances, the entire eastern half of Australia might be bone dry.Even as people change the climate by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, variability will continue to play a large role in Australia’s climate.

Droughts tend to be managed by developing policies with a short-term outlook, such as government handouts to farmers and water buyback schemes. The Australian government’s interpretation of what constitutes a drought must change to cope with the pressures of a more variable and arid climate.In his foreword to the government’s drought response, resilience and preparedness plan, Drought Minister David Littleproud Drought is a term that has long been used to describe low water availability in Australia. One of the researchers (Kathy Allen) retrieving a tree core from a king billy pine in Tasmania.A slice of coral from the Great Barrier Reef, photographed under UV light. We need a proactive policy structure and debate which engages with the direct effects of climate change, not just drought.The Strategist — The Australian Strategic Policy Institute Blog.