Australia has the highest weather variability of any inhabited continent … and it seems it just keeps getting more and more unpredictable.
We’ve had heatwaves, floods, fires, tornadoes and droughts, and it’s difficult for grey nomads, and just about everybody else, to know what’s coming next. Having just sweltered through what was officially Australia’s hottest recorded summer ever … it’s now hard to know whether to take an umbrella and gumboots or extra water and sunscreen on that big bushwalk.
While much of the east coast is still mopping up after torrential rain, inland areas are still praying for an end to the big dry. The outback Queensland town of Boulia did not record a single drop of rain for the first two months of this year … the first time it has happened since records began in the late 1800s.
The Bureau of Meteorology says the Northern Territory is also having its driest wet season in more than two decades. The last time the Top End had such little rainfall was the 1991-92 wet season. Meanwhile, three east-coast locations broke rainfall records, with The Head on the Great Dividing Range, Builyan, and the town of 1770 south of Gladstone all registering nearly a metre of rain.
“The whole urban media are focused on the rain and the floods down there by the coast but certainly there are parts of this diverse state that are very, very dry,” said Howard Hobbs, the state Member for Warrego in inland Queensland, “We’ll certainly be hoping that in the next couple of months we’ll get some rain because if we don’t, we’ll be in dire straits.”
Mr Hobbs said that, without significant rain, there were concerns over the very future of places around Morven and Charleville, out on the Cooper.
Thankfully, the autumn outlook is good for drought-hit southwest Queensland, with a prediction for a 60-70% chance of better-than-average rain.
Have you been hunkering down from the rain or from the relentless sun? Are changing weather patterns making it harder to plan the ‘perfect’ Big Lap? Or does it make staying in the uncrowded north for the ‘wet’ seem more attractive? Comment below.
