Marufish BLoG

All dry on the western front The Australian, May 13, 2009 IT has been labelled the cousin of El Nino, the Indian Ocean's equivalent of the climatic engine in the Pacific that drives the cycle of droughts and floods in Australia's southeast. But when CSIRO scientist Wenju Cai factored the Indian Ocean Dipole into his climate model, he found that this little cousin could contribute to droughts. It could depress spring rainfall by up to 30 per cent in Australia's southeast, a region encompassing the nation's food bowl, the southern Murray-Darling Basin. And with global warming set to increase the frequency of dipole events, Australia was likely to get even bigger climatic shocks than previously thought, the computer simulations suggested. Much of Australia's climatological research has focused so far on the Pacific Ocean's El Nino-Southern Oscillation pattern. Droughts hit when the eastern Pacific warms, weakening the eastern trade winds that bear rain to southeast...