Sudden Stratospheric Warming and the result:

PROLONGED WEATHER STASIS, AUSTRALIA AND THE QUEENSLAND DROUGHT. First published Sept 16 2019

Queensland and NSW drought, September 2019, possible prognosis.

In Queensland and New South Wales we are experiencing a period of sunny days, not unusual in normal years. However, this is not a normal year.

Due to the rare phenomenon of Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW) over the Antarctic, the immediate effect is stagnation of local climate in its current mode: absence of cloud, the satellite images  showing no foreseeable rain events.

Prediction of effect and duration, due to the scarcity of previous SSW events in the Southern Hemisphere, is at present  educated guesswork based on Northern Hemisphere knowledge, but the relatively small land-mass and vast ocean may cause a different outcome.

It is thought that the southern parts of South America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand could be affected, with cold, wet or snow to the southern extremities (Tasmania, NZ South Island, etc..) rain to the north (Cape York), and static drought and cool conditions between.

Queensland is being affected now. Already, the loss of water supply in many townships is imminent. Maintaining these areas will soon become a logistical problem with perhaps no solution, other than importing water in road tankers and instigating savage restrictions. Long-term pipe-line construction may be immediately considered.

The principal and un-answerable question is: how long will this Queensland drought last? So little information on the effect and duration of Sudden Stratospheric Warming in the southern hemisphere makes prediction most uncertain. The Bureau of Meteorology, Australia, tentatively forecasts current dry conditions until December/January, but this is of necessity guesswork.

We are in Queensland currently experiencing an event for the first time in our short technological history, though no doubt common in past eras. For the past twenty years the graph of rainfall has been trending downwards, despite occasional blips. Records for 100 years prior make assessment of trends confusing, but simple observation of geographic features make obvious the fact that large creek-beds and alluvial levels suggest that floods were massive and regular in the past.

But when was that past? In living memory creeks regularly flooded fifty years ago, but not since. Perhaps flood-plain building is a more recent phenomenon than thought. The last Brisbane flood deposited ten to twenty centimetres of alluvial silt in a small suburban area upstream from the city. There was no flooding downstream; river banks contained the flow.

Previous floods within the past 180 years were similar, but nothing compared with the massive plain-building events of the un-documented past.

Perhaps SSW in the past caused small-scale ‘Punctuated Equilibrium’ events, altering the climate at each stage, wetter or drier. Our tree-cover in Queensland is variously fragile. Right now, September 16th 2019, in, for example, the Toowoomba area, some eucalypts and wattles are on the point of dessication; a not unusual event. Within one day, as roots dry out, leaves hang limp: the tree is dead. The more substantially-rooted species last longer.

Once this stage has been reached, without rain, more trees die, the most susceptible first. Bleached white gums are the tombstones of previous dry periods, a condition we consider normal now in our recent history. Perhaps Aboriginal experience would shed light on the true situation. Fire and drought have no doubt reduced original rain- and vine-forest to the present small fraction, eucalypts once being in the minority.

Right now we are on the cusp of a Queensland drought which may not fit the ‘normal’ pattern, but which may continue over a vast area  for months. Neither water-supplies nor tree-cover can survive so long. This event may well be an example of previous sudden droughts which destroyed so much rain-forest, not as a result of climate-change over thousands of years, but of sudden Prolonged Weather Stasis (SPWS); in this case drought. Six rainless months would just about kill all vegetation, leaving only seeds.

There are perhaps other examples on the planet of Prolonged Weather Stasis caused by SSW. One most obvious caused the extinction of the remaining woolly mammoths in Siberia. The startling discovery of these beasts encased in what until recently was permanent ice, revealed that they died in situ, where they were grazing. This astounding fact has only one meaning: on one single particular day, whilst the beasts were feeding, it was snowing, AND IT NEVER STOPPED. They became snow-bound, then suffocated where they stood, to be encased in a never-ending snowfall: the weather was locked in one mode.

Sudden Prolonged Weather Stasis could be to blame for many situations where civilisations small and large disappeared, leaving their cities intact. It is assumed their water supply failed, both for crops and dwellings. A dwindling supply would suggest a gradual decline of viable agriculture and consequent deterioration of buildings due to the population shrinkage, but a city deserted intact requires a sudden and permanent weather event. Otherwise it would be re-occupied.

There is also the possibility that sudden PWS is not an event after which the climate returns to normal. These events may be the tipping-points from which there is no return. We may be seeing, in Australia, not a gradual desertification from the Red Centre outwards, but a stepped series of drying-events from which the land does not recover its previous vegetation.

There are, around the planet, possible cases of SSW causing massive and continuing rain with its attendant disaster; the weather in fixed mode until SSW dissipates

So, what are we in for, here in Queensland? The next few months will tell. Extrapolating from the worst case is too dismal and obvious to describe, and calls for immediate action from engineers and planners from all Australian cities to solve what may be very long-term problems.

However, the effect of sudden Prolonged Weather Stasis on farming will be a disaster. We may be able to supply domestic water, but not food. Already, within weeks of the last small rain, there is no feed for cattle, all of which are, as I write, on their way to abattoirs. Dairy cows on many farms have no feed or no water, or neither. They may have to be culled soon. A fleet of cattle-trucks is on the road as I write.

Land-crops may be a tragedy; plant- nurseries surviving for a time on underground water. Infrastructure may survive until better times, but where will the farmers be then?

We can only hope that the present outlook is indeed temporary, and Sudden Prolonged Weather Stasis  is in fact not ‘prolonged’, but just a blip on the radar of our rather unsatisfactory climate.

Andy Jenner.