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As Spring heat records are matched or beaten an El Nino weather pattern has been formally declared.Credit:Brook Mitchell

The event is expected to last until late summer or early Autumn,said the Bureau of Meteorology’s Dr Karl Braganza during a press conference on Tuesday afternoon.

He said it was now up to individuals and communities,particularly those living in the nation’s south-east,to prepare for a summer of fire and heat hazards,but added that the landscape was not as dry as it had been leading into the catastrophic fires of 2019 and 2020.

Addressing a press conference in Tasmania Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Minister for Agriculture,Drought and Emergency Management Murray Watt would next week host a meeting of emergency services personnel and experts.

“We’ve anticipated this coming. The warnings are there,the science is there that our climate is changing,and unfortunately,we are seeing that on the ground as we saw during the summer of 2019-20.

“So we would urge people to follow advice when it is given. We are doing what we can in the short term as well to ameliorate the risk. In the long term,we need to tackle climate change.”

Braganza said global atmospheric said ocean temperatures had been at record levels since April. The event is occurring simultaneously with a so-called positive Indian Ocean Dipole,which typically sees the Indian Ocean hotter on its western edge

“All models predict this positive IOD will persist to at least the end of spring,” said the bureau in a statement. “A positive IOD typically leads to reduced spring rainfall for central and south-east Australia.

“When a positive IOD and El Niño occur together,their drying effect is typically stronger and more widespread across Australia.”

Early indications suggest that this could turn out to be a powerful El Nino event. “Having said that the strength of an El Nino by those measures doesn’t necessarily correspond to the severity of the rainfall deficiencies over Australia,” said Braganza. “We have had weak events that have caused quite significant drought. And we’ve been strong events that haven’t caused such severe conditions in the past.

The declaration follows those by the US Climate Prediction Centre,the United Nations World Meteorological Organisation and the Japan Meteorological Agency.

The weather bureau’s criteria for declaring an El Nino to be underway includes measurements of sea surface temperature in parts of the Pacific Ocean and the direction and strength of trade winds,which typically blow from east to west across the Pacific,leading to less moisture in the air around Australia,which contributes reduced rains and higher temperatures.

The declaration comes after the northern hemisphere suffered through its hottest summer in history,thought to have been accelerated by an increase in the average global temperature caused by climate change. The World Meteorological Organisationpredicts that the average global temperature will be between 1.1 degrees and 1.8 degrees higher than the 1850-1900 average over the next five years.

Global temperatures have contributed to unprecedented wildfires in Canada and Hawaii,heatwaves across Europe,catastrophic flooding in Libya and acollapse in sea ice coverage in the Antarctic.

In its statement,the weather bureau said that in August 2023 sea surface temperatures were the warmest globally for any month since observational records began in 1850,and that July and August 2023 were also respectively the hottest and second-hottest months globally in terms of 2-metre air temperature.

Australia’s climate has warmed by an average of 1.48 degrees since national records began in 1910.

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