Bushfire conditions in eastern Australia will be at “near record values” this spring following what appears to be the driest winter since 2002, the Bureau of Meteorology has said.
The dry winter in 2002 was followed by a very damaging bushfire season, including the devastating Canberra bushfires that culminated in a suburban firestorm on 18 January, 2003, and a series of bushfires in the Victorian alps that ran for 59 days and burned 5% of the state.
However, while the hot and dry weather conditions of 2002/2003 were caused by an El Niño event, the bureau’s manager of climate prediction, Andrew Watkins, said the warm and dry conditions in 2017 were part of a longer drying trend.
“This winter we haven’t had an El Niño, we also haven’t had a similar pattern called the Indian Ocean Dipole … so neither the Pacific nor the Indian Ocean have been pushing us toward drier conditions,” senior forecaster of extreme weather Scott Williams said.
He made the comments following the release of the seasonal outlook for spring, which promised warmer than average daytime temperatures and particularly warm overnight minimums throughout south-eastern, eastern, and northern Australia.
“There have been other years where we have had drier conditions without an El Niño but what we’ve been seeing more recently is a trend toward drier starts to winter, or rather the late autumn/early winter conditions, and certainly that’s been the long-term trend,” Watkins said. “Through south-eastern Australia we’ve certainly seen a shortening of our winters.”
One of the results of this trend is an earlier start to the bushfire season.
Warm, dry and windy conditions could cause problems in New South Wales as early as Monday, Williams said.
“Fingers crossed that this period of danger with strong westerlies bringing warmth and winds will be short-lived,” he said. “If it goes into October, I think NSW will be in trouble.”
NSW experienced deadly bushfires in October 2013, sparking concern from climate scientists and a claim from then prime minister, Tony Abbott, that the link between climate change and more frequent or more severe bushfires was “hogswash”.
The bureau will release its official summer bushfire outlook on Tuesday but Watkins said parts of southern Queensland and northern NSW were expected to show “near record values for winter in terms of fire potential”.
He said the fire potential in Victoria was also “above average”.
Despite biting winter conditions in southern Victoria in recent weeks, and a forecast of more cold weather, potentially damaging winds and snow down to 500 metres early next week, Watkins said 2017 was on track to be the warmest winter since 2009.
June 2017 was the third-hottest June on record globally, beaten only by temperatures in 2015 and 2016, and the second-hottest on record for Australia.
