Let's Go Back To Australia For More Weather Drama

A recent wildfire near Perth Stadium in western Australia. An incoming
heat wave will only make things worse.  Photo: AFP via BBC.

Summer has barely started in Australia, and the extremes are just coming fast and furious down under.

We've already mentioned the massive wildfires hitting large parts of the nation/continent. To make matters worse, a long lasting, intense heat wave is now moving into pretty much all of Australia, which is very roughly the size of the United States, excluding Alaska.

Perth in far western Australia, and Melbourne, in the southeast are expecting high temperatures of around 105 degrees this coming week, according to the BBC.  There's even a chance Australia could break the record for its all time hottest temperature, which is 123.3 degrees.

And there have been incredible thunderstorms, producing massive hailstones that have pummeled and wrecked countless cars, roofs and windows, and flash flooding that have quickly inundated neighborhoods. Some areas around Brisbane got as much as five inches of rain in a little more than an  hour.

Before you say that at least the storms are dropping rain to squelch all those wildfires, think again. The storms, intense as they are, have been quite localized, causing patches of severe damage, but not wetting down most of the landscape. So the fires burn on.

Image from the Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology
shows a big upward trend in that nation's temperatures.

Still, areas around Brisbane got a little drought relief from the storms, so that's a small area of good news in hot, burning Australia. However, areas in southeastern Australia below Brisbane with the most intense fires got little or no rain.

The incoming heat wave will also dry out any place that did manage to get some rain and hail, increasing the risk of wildfires.

If you think I've been harping on Australian heat and fires every winter (their summer), you're right. Like most of the rest of the world. Australia is heating up with climate change, so the summers are generally hotter there. That, in turn, helps make the bush fires, bigger, more intense and longer lasting.

Even if the heat and drought are briefly interrupted by thunderstorms, destructive as they may be, they're generally not enough to overcome the effects of the summer heat

Here's a hailstorm wrecking a roof of one Australian house in the past couple of days:



News report on the Brisbane storm. Mixed emotions, clearly. Happy for the drought-relieving rain, not so much for the flash flooding:



Meanwhile, in New Zealand, heavy rains caused this huge cliff to collapse. Hope nobody was standing beneath it!