Potential for historically unprecedented Australian droughts  from natural variability and climate change

Falster, Georgina M.; Wright, Nicky M.; Abram, Nerilie J.; Ukkola, Anna M.; Henley, Benjamin J.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-28-1383-2024

Articles | Volume 28, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-28-1383-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Drought, society, and ecosystems (NHESS/BG/GC/HESS inter-journal...

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-28-1383-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 28, issue 6

Research article

|

27 Mar 2024

Research article |

| 27 Mar 2024

Potential for historically unprecedented Australian droughts from natural variability and climate change

Georgina M. Falster, Nicky M. Wright, Nerilie J. Abram, Anna M. Ukkola, and Benjamin J. Henley

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Cumulative views and downloads (calculated since 04 Jul 2023)

Month	HTML	PDF	XML	Total
Jul 2023	188	199	7	394
Aug 2023	53	23	2	78
Sep 2023	83	20	8	111
Oct 2023	55	21	6	82
Nov 2023	16	12	0	28
Dec 2023	24	14	2	40
Jan 2024	35	9	2	46
Feb 2024	45	26	1	72
Mar 2024	270	62	7	339
Apr 2024	1,822	207	16	2,045
May 2024	313	61	14	388
Jun 2024	221	39	6	266

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Short summary

Multi-year droughts have severe environmental and economic impacts, but the instrumental record is too short to characterise multi-year drought variability. We assessed the nature of Australian multi-year droughts using simulations of the past millennium from 11 climate models. We show that multi-decadal megadroughts are a natural feature of the Australian hydroclimate. Human-caused climate change is also driving a tendency towards longer droughts in eastern and southwestern Australia.