Australia's decade-long drought ends

Andy Coghlan in New Scientist: It's official. Australia's decade-long drought ended this week. But that doesn't mean the region is in the clear, warn hydrologists.

"No predictions have been made on the timing of the next drought, but the scientific view is that in the southeast of Australia, we should expect droughts to become more severe and more frequent," says Bill Young, a leading hydrologist at CSIRO, Australia's national science agency.

Young says that elements of the recent drought are consistent with what is expected from an event that is driven by climate change. However, researchers have yet to pin down the exact contribution of greenhouse gas emissions and natural variability in the climate.

Australia's extremes of drought and flood see-saw with the cycles of the El Niño and La Niña climate oscillation. The warming effect of emissions complicates this cycle, so modelling the overall effect is fraught with uncertainty....

Gone driveabout 28, drought in the Wheatlands, Western Australia, 25 Oct. 2010, shot by Phillip Capper, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license