After three consecutive years of wet and cold La Niña weather conditions during summer, another expert is certain the weather pendulum will swing all the way back to a hot and dry El Niño this year.
The US Climate Prediction Center, a United States government agency, predicts a 90 per cent chance of El Niño conditions this summer, with a more than 50 per cent chance the conditions will be ‘severe’.
El Niño occurs when the sea surface temperatures rise at least 0.8C above the long term average in a part of the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.
In Australia, this raises the risk of drought, heatwaves and bushfires in the east of the country and also increases the chances of mass coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef.
Nine of the 10 driest winter-to-spring transition periods for eastern Australia on record have been during El Niño years.
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