Prospects for drought prediction in Australia and Indonesia

Australia is a land of poets and droughts, and drought has always been a popular subject for poems. Many of these indicate the awe with which Australians traditionally have viewed drought. The severe impact of droughts on Australia and Indonesia has generated much interest in identifying “patterns” of drought occurrence that might be useful in drought prediction. In Australia, most of the early work concentrated on searches for drought “cycles.” The Southern Oscillation and the El Nino have “patterns” of occurrence similar to Australian droughts. The El Nino warming starts early in the calendar year and increases through the Southern Hemisphere winter, spring, and summer before weakening the following autumn. Much of the interannual variability of Australian and Indonesian rainfall is related to the Southern Oscillation phenomenon. A long-enough record of good quality sea surface temperature is not available to test whether changes routinely precede drought years.