THE Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) issued its national rainfall outlook for spring on August 28 last year indicating it would be wetter than average for most of the Murray-Darling Basin and especially central Victoria.
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Then on September 25, 2013, the BoM issued another forecast, this time suggesting a drier than normal season was likely for most of the Murray-Darling Basin.
That was after the dry start, contrary to the original forecast, and there was no reason given for the dramatic change in the seasonal forecast.
Engineer Kevin Long, Bendigo, Victoria, made a spring forecast, also published on August 28, 2013.
He forecast below average rainfall for central Victoria and above average temperatures and that river stream flows would drop away quickly in the Murray-Darling.
Mr Long's forecast was much closer to the observed.
Mr Long looks for patterns in historical data and relates these to current and future solar and lunar cycles.
Like the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, Mr Long has a keen interest in sunspot cycles.
At the beginning of this year the space centre gave an update on its prediction for sunspot cycle 24 including comment that we are currently more than five years into cycle 24 and the predicted and observed size makes this the smallest sunspot cycle since cycle 14, which had a maximum of 64.2 sunspots within the cycle in February of 1906.
In his 2014 Australia Weather Almanac, Ken Ring, who also relies on lunar and solar cycles, suggests we need to go back to 1904-1908 to find similar years to this year.
If the past is a clue to the future climate, it is worth considering the circumstances of the Federation Drought.
Dry conditions established in the late 1890s and continued until November 1902 when the drought broke.
While 1903 may have been a relatively wet year, the Federation Drought is generally seen as marking a major climate shift across eastern Australia to four relatively dry decades until the 1950s.
Are there climate records for your town or property that stretch back that far? If so, what were conditions like from 1903 through to 1908 in terms of both rainfall and temperature?
Historical temperature and rainfall data for Australia is available from the BoM including time series charts of annual rainfall for the Murray-Darling Basin.
Click here for more information on Kevin Long.
Click here for more information on Ken Ring.
Dr Jennifer Marohasy is an independent environmental writer and researcher now living near Rockhampton in central Queensland.
