The Bureau of Meteorology has released its January climate summaries revealing that last month was Australia’s warmest on record.
The Bureau found the mean temperature for January averaged across the country exceeded 30 degrees, the first time that had occurred in any month.
Senior Climatologist at the Bureau, Andrew Watkins said the heat through January was unprecedented.
“We saw heatwave conditions affect large parts of the country through most of the month, with records broken for both duration and also individual daily extremes,” Dr Watkins said.
“The main contributor to this heat was a persistent high pressure system in the Tasman sea which was blocking any cold fronts and cooler air from impacting the south of the country.”
He said that at the same time there was a delayed onset to the monsoon in the north of the country which meant there was no cooler, moist air being injected from the north.
“The warming trend which has seen Australian temperatures increase by more than one degree in the last 100 years also contributed to the unusually warm conditions,” Dr Watkins said.
He noted that Australia had experienced its warmest month on record in terms of mean, maximum, and minimum temperatures.
Rainfall was below average for most areas but the monsoon trough brought some significant totals to northern Queensland late in the month.
The Bureau’s findings for the month for each State and Territory can be accessed at this PS News link.
