If the sudden heat wave we are experiencing in spring wasn’t confirmation enough, the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) has officially announced that the El Nino climate pattern has come into effect in Australia. 

A meteorologist with the Bureau of Meteorology said now that the El Nino pattern is settling in, it increases the BoM’s confidence this pattern will last until the end of summer – meaning a continuation of warm and dry conditions.

“We are already seeing extreme conditions in some parts of the continent, particularly in the duration of heat,” he said. “We’ve had an extended period of warm and dry weather to start spring, today we’ve had catastrophic conditions on the south coast of NSW just to underscore that risk.”

“While we are different to leading into the black summer in 2019 where we had years of preceding drought, we do have a wetter landscape out there, it is drying out more rapidly than has occurred in recent years, and we are seeing that elevated risk now occurring in eastern NSW in particular and Sydney equalling its record so far today for temperatures for September,” he continued.

The BoM has been hesitant to declare the climate event compared to the rest of the world. In July, the United Nations World Meteorological Organisation announced El Nino had kicked in. A month before that the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had said the same. 

The reason why BoM has been on ‘El Nino alert’ in recent months is because the bureau has a different definition of the climate pattern and is strict when it comes to the level sea surface temperatures have to reach. BoM needs it to be as much as 0.8c warmer than normal plus other factors. While sea surface temperatures had exceeded the El Nino threshold in recent months, other factors like wind, clouds and broad scale pressure patterns haven’t occurred till now. 

So get your SPF ready. Looks like this summer is going to be a scorcher. If you’re looking for places to cool off this summer, why not take a dip at these secret beaches in NSW or dive into the most stunning natural pools across Australia. 

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