Australia: This drought may never break

IT MAY be time to stop describing south-eastern Australia as gripped by drought and instead accept the extreme dry as permanent, one of the nation’s most senior weather experts warned yesterday.

“Perhaps we should call it our new climate,” said the Bureau of Meteorology’s head of climate analysis, David Jones.

NSW’s mean temperature was 1.13 degrees above average. “That is a very substantial anomaly,” Dr Jones said. “It’s equivalent to moving NSW 150 kilometres closer to the equator.”

Sydney Morning Herald