Dr. Kimberley Reid

The positive Indian Ocean Dipole plus an El Nino is usually when we want to be wary of droughts and potential bushfires.

But it's currently sitting in the neutral phase.

So we don't quite have the conditions necessary for really bad drought or really bad bushfires at the moment.

Yeah, Godzilla's thrown around.

I've seen Kraken El Nino, which doesn't really mean anything.

I think people are just listing mythical creatures at this point.

So the more closer to real phrase is, well, Godzilla is really just a term people are using to sound scary.

But Super El Nino people have probably seen.

which refers to when those ocean temperatures, you know how I mentioned that threshold that we have to be above 0.8 degrees Celsius for an El Nino?

Well, super or strong El Nino is when that exceeds two degrees Celsius.

And we're not quite at that two degrees Celsius yet, but the models are predicting that we might hit that.

But the key for us here in Australia is that the strength of an El Nino, so whether it's super or Godzilla or whatever,

isn't actually that well correlated to the impacts of an aluminium because it's that atmospheric component, the trade winds and the position of the storms that's also really important for us.

So a super El Nino doesn't mean a super drought or super bushfire.

The relationship between the impacts is not a direct relationship.

Whether or not there's an El Nino is a lot more important for us than the strength of an El Nino.

Before we had the...

powerful models that we have at the moment, historically looking at whether we were in El Niño or La Niña was sort of the best guess that we had for what the next few months could bring in terms of weather.

But nowadays, our models have become a lot more sophisticated.

where we don't have to just rely on these historical relationships.