The severe El Nino over summer that many weather agencies, including the Bureau of Meteorology, was forecasting last year, has clearly overshot Australia.
That misforecast has been credited for bringing enormous hardship to farmers. Some prominent stock agents say the so-called 'El Nino panic' wiped $10 billion from the cattle market alone.
What has occurred is actually not unprecedented, although it's very rare, climate scientists have found.
This month, a number of seasonal climate forecasting experts from both Australia and overseas, have investigated every single El Nino event forecast for the past 70 years against the actual outcome.
Roger Stone, professor emeritus in climate science at the University of Southern Queensland and chair of the Standing Committee on Services to Agriculture at the World Meteorological Organisation, said the current pattern in the upper atmospheres over the Pacific and Indian Oceans was remarkably similar to that in 1997/98 - when the 'El Nino of the Century' was forecast for Australia.
"This pattern tends to produce major subsidence - drought impacts - over the eastern Indian Ocean and so the lack of rainfall tends to affect the Indian Ocean rather than eastern Australia," he said.
"So there was precedent for an El Nino of this intensity to overshoot Australia but only one. We recognised it was happening in 1997 but that seemed to have been forgotten this time."
Prof Stone said he well-remembered the panic mode instigated from the forecast of an intense El Nino in 1997.
"The BBC even sent a television crew out to cover the looming disaster in Australia but nothing happened," he said.
As the BOM comes under heavy fire from many in the farming business for getting it so wrong, Prof Stone said there were some who were warning caution around the intense El Nino forecast last year from the perspective of the 1997 event.
"Some seasonal climate forecast systems, such as ECMWF and the Queensland Government system that is strongly statistical, picked this up," he said.
"The BOM's seasonal climate forecast system is a hybrid between its own models and that of the UK Met office. I'm not sure it did so well on this.
"But this is a rare event since we don't have many of these extremely severe El Ninos - in fact only two now in 70 years.
"Our analysis, which includes climatologists and geographers from Europe, shows this current extremely intense El Nino and that of 1997/98, which produced remarkably similar rainfall patterns in Australia to the current pattern, are the only events globally to display this current upper-level dynamics."
He said it was understandable farmers would be spooked by an intense El Nino forecast.
"Most of our bad droughts have occurred in mediocre El Ninos," he said.
"That was the case in 2019. This time, the difference was it was a particularly intense El Nino forecast which explains why farmers would react so strongly, given what the last drought brought and now they were being told intense rather than mediocre."
The conclusion that could perhaps be drawn now was that "the intense El Ninos we all fear may not affect Australia too badly," Prof Stone said.
Shan Goodwin
Shan Goodwin steers ACM’s national coverage of the beef industry. Shan has worked as a journalist for 30 years, the majority of that with agricultural publications. She spent many years as The Land’s North Coast reporter and has visited beef properties and stations throughout the country and overseas. She treats all breeds equally. Contact 0427686187. E: s.goodwin@austcommunitymedia.com.au
Shan Goodwin steers ACM’s national coverage of the beef industry. Shan has worked as a journalist for 30 years, the majority of that with agricultural publications. She spent many years as The Land’s North Coast reporter and has visited beef properties and stations throughout the country and overseas. She treats all breeds equally. Contact 0427686187. E: s.goodwin@austcommunitymedia.com.au
