Australia Heat Unprecedented, And Fires Threaten Sydney

Worrisome front page of Australia's Sydney
Moring Herald today. 

I've been harping on Australia for a month or two now as they had such an extreme, dangerous spring and summer so far. And it just got a lot worse.

As a reminder, Australia is south of the Equator. So as we Vermonters shiver in subzero weather, it's time for heat waves down under.

Australia is always generally hot in the summer, but what's going on there is both unprecedented and scary.

For the continent as a whole Wednesday the average continent wide daytime high temperature was 41.9 C or 107.2F, which was the hottest day in Australian history.  It shattered the previous record set just the day before, on Tuesday by a full degree Celsius. Which is a lot when you're averaging out a whole continent.

A small hamlet named Nullarbor in southern Australia reached 121.8 degrees, which is the highest temperature recorded anywhere on Earth in any December, says Bob Henson in Weather Underground's Category 6 blog.

That's not quite the hottest temperature every recorded in Australia, but it was close. (The hottest being 123.3 degrees in January, 1960.

Henson, in Category 6, explains the extreme Australian heat is being caused by a number of factors. It's right around the Summer Solstice down under, so sunshine is at its peak. An  ongoing drought means the solar energy is warming the ground and the air just above it, and not evaporating soil moisture. (Evaporation tends to keep temperatures down a bit.)

A cyclical weather pattern is encouraging air to sink over Australia. Sinking air clears the skies and warms the air.  On top of this, climate change is probably turning what would have been a nasty heat wave into an extreme, record breaking one.

Climate change is affecting Australia like it is most of the world.  The trendline in Australia has been toward more intense heat waves and droughts, interspersed with more intense storms and flooding.  Ominously, this trend will likely continue in the coming decades, so the heat and fires Australia is now experiencing could easily get even worse in the future.

Speaking of wildfires, it's bone dry in the heat in large swaths of Australia, and destructive wildfires have been burning in many areas, as i've noted before.

The front page of the Sydney Morning Herald today is terrifying: "Fires Close In On City" with a large photo of an intense fire.

Two firefighters died in a crash while fighting wildfires on Thursday.  The heat and wind are iexpected to intensify through Saturday in southeastern Australia, including around Sydney, so that is far from good news.

Here's a rather dire newscast about the fires from Australia: