Dr. Kimberley Reid

So there's no point declaring it if it's only going to last a week.

Yeah.

And each of these meteorological agencies uses a slightly different criteria because different aspects of the aluminium are more important for different regions.

So the US and the Japanese meteorological agencies, they use a surface temperature threshold of 0.5 degrees Celsius above normal.

So we use 0.8, which is slightly stricter, which is one of the key reasons why there is a bit of a delay.

But for this situation,

There was only a few days out and the bomb does their annual updates on Tuesdays, whereas the US does their annual updates on Thursdays.

So I think in this particular case, it was more just a scheduling difference rather than a scientific difference.

So even though they're a few days apart, they're usually not too wildly different.

Yeah, it's a valid concern and I've seen lots of concerns on the internet, social media and in the media that we're, with this super El Nino, we're about to go into bushfire and extreme heat.

But I want to be clear that...

And El Nino Declaration itself is not a forecast.

And so while historically average maximum temperatures in Australia, especially in winter and spring, do tend to be hotter than average, and we do tend to get drier than average conditions, particularly in the West in winter and spring,

Every El Niño is different.

We've seen examples in the past where really strong El Niños have brought pretty mixed rainfall responses.

And we've also seen examples where quite weak El Niños, such as 2002, 2003, led to really hot weather and bushfires in Canberra.

Another really important point is that El Niño is just one ingredient in the recipe that leads to Australia's actual weather that we feel on the ground.

There are other similar phenomena happening that are also influencing our weather on top of El Niño.

So in the west, we have what's called the Indian Ocean Dipole, which is kind of like El Niño and La Niña's cousin in the Indian Ocean.

in the south we look at the position of the jet stream because that can affect whether cold fronts and low pressure systems of antarctica how often they hit us and in the north we're really looking at storm activity and the position of storm activity and all these factors come together to influence our weather so personally i'm keeping an eye on what's happening in the west because if that indian ocean dipole which refers to temperature differences across the indian ocean hits its positive phase