Frosty the Bushman

CSIRO (The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) blog CSIROscope, recently posted, summarizing a paper documenting the anomalously high number of frosts  during the winter of 2016, in SW Western Australia and tried to identify an anthropogenic climate change fingerprint in this (sub-zero temperatures and frosts in WA shown in Fig.1).



Figure 1. Left) Temperatures locally of -3.5oC in SW Australia during July 2017. Right) Freezing conditions recorded in Western Australia during July 2017. Photos - J Chapman.

The paper concludes that variations in the large-scale circulation patterns, resulting from anthropogenic influence have caused an enhancement in weather systems, causing more cold episodes, during winter, in SW Western Australia. Showing that the outcomes of climate change can be unexpected and complex, even though nation wide the temperature has risen by +0.94°C since 1911.

The SW region of WA is known as the wheatbelt (as touched upon in the post 'Rainfall reduction in SW Australia') and is historically Australia's most consistent wheat growing region, however the variability described above, makes this more uncertain, in 2016 one millions tonnes of grain crops were lost as a result of the frosts.


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