Add Category
Dr Tom Mortlock, a senior analyst at Aon insurance company and an adjunct fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, said it was the first time researchers had looked at the effects bushfires on a global scale.
“There has never really been a bushfire big enough to look at this before,” said Mortlock. “We do know there is a causal link between volcanism [volcanic explosions] and ENSO, and this tells us that everything is connected.”
Imagery from the Japanese weather satellite Himawari-8 shows the blanket of bushfire smoke that blew across the Tasman Sea was wide enough to cover all of New Zealand’s South Island.
Most climate change research suggests that extremes in our weather patterns will become more frequent. The effects of El Nino and La Nina could become more pronounced, but this does depend on where anomalous warming occurs across the Pacific.
Professor Pete Strutton, from the Institute for Marine and Antarctic studies at the University of Tasmania, said it showed regional events like bushfires could have global implications.
Loading
“It’s an example of long-term climate change having a feedback effect on climate variability,” said Strutton. “If it weren’t for those fires we might have flipped back to El Nino in the years that followed.”
“We know from looking at historical insurance loss data that bushfire losses are correlated to periods of El Nino. There is now a 60 per cent chance that El Nino will begin to form this winter, peaking in spring and summer.”
Australia’s Bureau of Meterology says there is a 50 per cent chance of an El Nino occurring later this year, with models showing it would be under way by August.
But Strutton said the consensus from scientists at the World Meteorological Organisation is that there is a 60 per cent chance El Nino will form. “It’s looking more likely than not,” he said.
The Black Summer period was the culmination of several years of hot and dry conditions in Australia.
Loading
The bushfires spawned an increase in rare fire-induced thunderclouds, known as “pyrocumulonimbus” clouds.
This “super outbreak”, as scientists called it, injected plumes of smoke into the stratosphere, a layer of the atmosphere that starts about 15 kilometres above the Earth.
There, the smoke plumes created self-sustaining vortexes that circled the globe.
Get to the heart of what’s happening with climate change and the environment. Our fortnightly Environment newsletter brings you the news, the issues and the solutions. Sign up here.