Weather News

El Nino to return

The Bureau of Meteorology is forecasting a dry season as the region enters an El Nino weather pattern.

During June, sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean were about half a degree warmer than usual.

Climatologist, Acacia Pepler says it is an indicator that the western region will have a drier than average winter and spring and a warmer than usual summer.

She says there is no way of telling how severe the dry spell will be or how long it will last.

"Most of the models are thinking it's going to be a weak El Nino event although there's still a lot of variation between the different runs they do," she said.

"However, El Ninos are a bit less simple to than La Ninas in terms of impact.

"It very much depends on what happens during the events.

"We can't say right now how big the impacts will be."

However, she says a potential drought could be avoided due to a different weather cycle also impacting Australia.

"One of the things that's going on at the moment is that we also have very warm sea surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean off WA and those tend to give a much increased rainfall across Australia so that might act to moderate the impact of the El Nino if we're lucky." 17


- ABC

© ABC 2012

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