For an organisation that invests a considerable portion of their half a billion dollar budget predicting what’s going to happen in 100 years’ time, the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) has fallen short on the all-important, short term forecasts.
A read of BoM’s seventh biennial State of the Climate 2022 is an example of the effort that BoM puts into long term forecasting, resources that arguably should be devoted to improving the annual predictions around El Niño and La Niña.
Why don’t they produce an annual State of the El Niño La Niña Report that details the sea and air forces at work across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, which are the biggest indicators of the risks of summer storms or the next big drought?
Farmers want less climate change lecturing on the doomsday predictions of global warming, and more lectures on the complexity of the dynamic system that actually influences the day to day, week to week, and month to month rain and temperature that impacts their annual production.
We don’t need yet another government agency pushing the global warming climate catastrophe barrel. We get it, we are all doomed unless we act urgently.
In the meantime, however, can someone please let us know if it’s going to be a wet or dry winter?
The field of weather forecasting has come a long way since the 1860s, when the first forecasts, published by Robert FitzRoy – earlier in life the captain of HMS Beagle on Darwin’s famous voyage – began predicting storms by telegraphing the weather from one side of the UK to the other.
Today, BoM’s seven day forecasts are as good as the four day forecast were in the 1980s, and daily maximum temperature predictions are now accurate to within 2 degrees of actual temperatures 89.4 per cent of the time, which is five per cent better than 15 years ago.
So we know their short term models and predictions have improved markedly, but what farmers are really interested in is the longer term 150 day forecasts on seasonal rainfall.
To improve this area of forecasting, Australia should be putting more resources into understanding El Niño and La Niña, collectively known as the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, or (ENSO) along with the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) and the Southern Annular Mode (SAM), and less into 50 year climate predictions.
Interestingly, 2024 marks the 50th year since the first attempt to model El Niño made back in 1974.
They were motivated by the 1972-73 El Niño, which triggered a collapse of the Peruvian anchovy fishery, the largest in the world at the time, with consequences that rippled throughout the global economy.
Back then there were no satellites observing the ocean, no real-time measurements as we have from moorings, floats, and other observing systems in the ocean today, none of the sophisticated statistical forecasting methodologies we have now, and no comprehensive coupled ocean-atmosphere numerical prediction models.
Meteorologists had just formulated a new theory suggesting that if the trade winds in the central Pacific blew stronger than normal for a year or two, that would set the stage for a subsequent El Niño when the trades eventually weakened.
So, did they get it right? Unfortunately, no. It took another 10 years before the first successful El Niño forecast was made for 1986. However, even though we now know a lot more than we did back then, have significantly more data to work with, and have far more technically advanced prediction tools, forecasts still sometimes wildly miss the mark.
You won’t hear this from an organisation that has a budget of $581m, 2374 staff, 69 weather radars, 720+ automatic weather stations, 13 wind profilers, 38 upper air balloon stations, 5,600+ hydrological monitoring stations operated by the Bureau and its partners, ~3,100 volunteer rainfall observers, 41 sea level stations, 43 wave buoys operated by the Bureau and its partners, 54 drifting meteorological buoys, 6 ozone monitoring sites, 13 terrestrial solar radiation monitors, 21 space weather observation stations and 30+ satellites operated by international partners.
BoM is devoting far too many of its resources on climate change and telling us what’s likely to happen in 50 or 100 years’ time, when we are all much more interested in their predictions on what’s likely to happen in 50 or 100 days time.
We know El Niño and La Niña events occur every two to seven years, with BoM predicting back in May last year a 55 per cent chance of a strong El Niño, up 15 per cent from the previous month, while the US Climate Prediction Centre predicted that there was an 80 per cent chance of a moderate El Niño occurring, with more than a 90 per cent chance that it would last into summer.
I want to read these predictions and know why they vary. I suspect farmers would be avid readers of an annual 30 page detailed BoM publication that sets out the data behind their predictions, highlights the variables and historical analogies. Forget producing more of the State of the Climate Reports on long term climate change, it’s time to put those resources into a State of El Niño La Nina Report.
