Yamba (pop. est. 6,388) at the mouth of the Clarence River estuary on the NSW far north coast, has an official weather station ID: 058012 which has been recording observations since May 1877 from a headline on the northside of the town.
What this relatively long history, of measuring air temperature, humidity levels, wind direction & velocity along with rainfall, is currently indicating is that from January to June 2023 monthly temperatures have been hotter than the 145 year averages.
While over the same period rainfall is so far below monthly averages that by June - the first month of Winter - rainfall was est. 125-127mm below the 145 year average for that month and occurred across only 7 of the 30 June days.
Yamba, like much of the Clarence Valley and 23.3% of the North Coast has been classified as Drought Affected on the NSW DPI Combined Drought Indicator (CDI).
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NSW DPI CDI mapping as of 12 July 2023
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Reading the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) webpages, it is looking increasingly likely that an El Niño event will be declared in the southern hemisphere before September 2023.
It seems that little Yamba and Australia are marching in step with the rest of the world.......
Washington
Post,
13
July 2023:
The
world is hotter than it’s been in thousands of years, and it’s as
if every alarm bell on Earth were ringing.
The
warnings are echoing through the drenched mountains of Vermont,
where two months of rain just fell in only two days. India
and Japan
were deluged by extreme flooding.
They’re
blaring from the scorching streets of Texas, Florida, Spain and
China, with a severe
heat wave also building in Phoenix and the Southwest in coming
days.
They’re
burbling up from the oceans, where temperatures have surged to levels
considered “beyond
extreme.”
And
they’re showing up in unprecedented, still-burning wildfires in
Canada that have sent plumes
of dangerous smoke into the United States.
Scientists
say there is no question that this cacophony was caused by climate
change — or that it will continue to intensify as the planet warms.
Research shows that human greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from
burning fossil fuels, have raised Earth’s temperature by about 1.2
degrees Celsius (2.2 Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. Unless
humanity radically transforms the way people travel, generate energy
and produce food, the global average temperature is on track to
increase by more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit), according
to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — unleashing
catastrophes that will make this year’s disasters seem mild.
The
only question, scientists say, is when the alarms will finally be
loud enough to make people wake up.
“This
is not the new normal,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist
at Imperial College London. “We don’t know what the new normal
is. The new normal will be what it is once we do stop burning fossil
fuels … and we’re nowhere near doing that.”….
Read
the full article here.
The Sydney Morning Herald,
14 July 2023, p 22:
Natural
disasters and extreme weather are thrashing the northern hemisphere
as temperature records rapidly topple. Floods are overwhelming parts
of Asia and Europe, fires are ravaging the US, sea surface
temperatures off Europe are the hottest on record and the global
average temperature has been at a record high four times in the past
week.
Drought
is sapping northern parts of China and heatwaves are paralysing
cities at the same time deadly floods displace thousands in the
south. It's just a taste of what's to come as climate change worsens.
Marine
heatwaves
The
ingredients for the catastrophic weather events in the northern
hemisphere have been brewing in global oceans for months. In the
lead-up to Earth's hottest week in recorded history, between July 3
and 9 this year, 40 per cent of the world's oceans were stewing
through severe marine heatwaves.
"A
big part of the fact that we've got these records occurring is
because the oceans are so warm," said marine heatwave expert
Associate Professor Alex Sen Gupta from UNSW's Climate Change
Research Centre. "It means it's very likely that this is going
to be the warmest year on record."
Much
of the North Atlantic suffered the most extreme marine heatwaves in
history. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called a
Category 5 (beyond extreme) heatwave in waters west of Ireland as
temperatures climbed 5 degrees above the June average.
The
record marine heat in the Atlantic spurred the formation of Tropical
Storm Bret, the most eastward ever tropical storm this early in the
year. Bret churned westward and swept through the Caribbean, damaging
water infrastructure in Barbados and shuttering schools in St Lucia.
The
ocean heatwaves have a high chance of holding strong for months,
potentially contributing to bursts of damaging rain or intensifying
heatwaves in Britain and Europe; one of either extremes. The warm
water will mix deeper down into the ocean and have global effects -
including on Arctic sea ice - for months.
The
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts that
by September, 50 per cent of the world's oceans could be experiencing
marine heatwaves. The normal global rate is 10 per cent.
Weatherzone
meteorologist Yoska Hernandez said the sea surface temperatures off
Australia are the warmest on record, about 0.3 to 0.5 degrees warmer
than last year.
Warm
oceans are particularly concerning because they increase moisture in
the atmosphere, which can lead to more intense rain events. In the
past two weeks, major floods have swept across the US, China, Japan,
Europe and Pakistan. Hernandez said the drivers behind the rain
events were all separate, but all occurred in the context of climate
change.
For
example, the Pakistan event has been the result of seasonal monsoonal
rains, with as much as six months' of rain falling in 18 hours over
some cities.
The
floods in the north of America have been driven by an intense front
moving over the region, dumping a lot of rain. There's a lot of
moisture in the atmosphere driven by the warming ocean temperatures.
In
Spain, a large thunderstorm has resulted in flash flooding across
Zaragoza in the country's northeast - with about 64mm falling over
some parts in a few hours. This is almost the average rainfall during
summer for the country.
Last
week, there were four days in which Earth's average temperature
reached record highs. The global average temperature hit 17.2 degrees
on Thursday, July 6, surpassing the 17.18-degree record set on July 4
and equalled on July 5, according to data from the University of
Maine's Climate Reanalyser. The previous record of 17.01 degrees was
set on Monday, July 3.
The
data relies on satellite information and computer simulations to
measure the world's condition. It is, however, worth noting NOAA said
it could not yet validate the data but that the agency recognised the
warm period was due to climate change.
"Combined
with El Niño and hot summer conditions, we're seeing record warm
surface temperatures being recorded at many locations across the
globe," the agency said last week.
The
World Meteorological Organisation, a specialised agency of the UN,
declared the El Niño event last week. It's one of the most important
drivers of unusual weather over the entire globe. In the southern
hemisphere, El Niño tends to have a drying effect, but in the
northern hemisphere it can increase rainfall.
For
most of Australia, El Niño brings dry weather, increasing bushfire
risk. But in other parts of the world it leads to wetter conditions,
as in southern America.
The
Bureau of Meteorology is yet to formally declare an El Niño event,
but is expected to do so in the coming weeks. The agency has
different criteria than other international weather agencies.
Sen
Gupta said it was unusual so many weather events associated with El
Niño, including fires and marine heatwaves, were striking before the
weather system had even formed (the system has a 90 per cent chance
of fully taking hold in the second half of the year).
Countries
including Australia were warned to prepare for bad fire seasons.
North America is currently in the midst of its most catastrophic fire
season ever, which has seen nearly 4000 fires tear across Canada.
Smoke spewed from the incineration of 9.5 million hectares and caused
the worst air pollution in large swathes of the US in recorded
history, draping cities such as New York in orange clouds of smog
last month.
Last
week in Beijing, as heat records topple across Asia, the government
ordered a pause in outdoor work as the city hit a 10-day streak of
days above 35 degrees, at the same time floods carried off cars and
destroyed buildings, killing at least a dozen people and displaced
thousands more in central and southern China.
Pinpointing
the effect of climate change on one weather event is a difficult
science, but a network of global researchers from the World Weather
Attribution zeroed in on a four-day heatwave that killed 13 people.
They concluded that human-induced climate change made the deadly heat
30 times more likely. (Another 96 people died from heat-related
conditions in India in June.)
Tipping
point
It's
a question we keep coming back to as records tumble.
Dr
Nandini Ramesh, a senior research scientist at CSIRO Data61, said
it's important to understand what a tipping point is.
"A
tipping point is when you push something until it can't be undone and
it exacerbates further warming. An example is the west Antarctic ice
sheet collapsing, which would cause irreversible effects on ocean
circulation and climate," she said…..
"The
ocean will [have] almost constant marine heat waves if we keep on
pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We have to continually
update what we class as a marine heatwave or, or go to more extreme
definitions."
More
than 61,000 people died because of last year's brutal summer heat
waves across Europe, according to a study in the journal Nature
Medicine. The findings suggest that two decades of efforts in Europe
to adapt to a hotter world have failed to keep up with the pace of
global warming. Extreme heat had been expected that summer based on
how much the planet had warmed in the past decade, the report notes.
This trend is likely to continue.
"Having
a warmer atmosphere makes both intense rain and heat waves worse,"
Ramesh said. "It will push us into temperatures that are
dangerous to the human body."
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