What the experts think will happen to northern Australia rainfall in the future due to climate change

Robyn Cowley, Senior Rangeland Scientist, DPIR Darwin

When it comes to predicted climate change in northern Australia, there is a lot of uncertainty about how rainfall might change, which is not very helpful, because rainfall is the most important driver of agriculture!

So I was very interested to see a recent webinar on future rainfall in northern Australia that provides new insights in this area. Visit the Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub website.

Dr Josephine Brown from the Bureau of Meteorology modelled future rainfall (2070 to 2099) for northern Australia. She used 35 different global climate models and looked at a number of emissions scenarios – basically different estimates of what carbon dioxide levels might be in the future.

There was a big variation in future rainfall predictions between the different models. 43% of models predict it will be drier and 37% wetter, with the remainder, not much change. This study investigated why the models differed in their rainfall predictions to work out what is more likely.

• The models that predicted a much drier future were not very good at simulating tropical climate patterns, so are probably unreliable. This left the models that predicted no change or wetter.
• She then looked at the effects of aerosols on future rainfall (this is the first time I have seen this included in climate change projections for our region).
• Aerosols (pollution from fires, cars, power generation and industry) are very important in predicting rainfall because 1) they cool the planet by scattering and absorbing incoming radiation and 2) water vapour condenses on the aerosol particles (condensation nuclei), creating clouds, which increases rainfall.
• Some climatologists think pollution over Asia may have contributed to recent higher rainfall over north-western Australia (VRD – Kimberley) since the 1970s (e.g. see boxes below), but whether the higher rainfall is due to natural variability, or aerosols, or both is still an active area of research.
• They think pollution over Asia has contributed to the relative cooling and drying of that region. When climate change models assume that aerosols will decline in the future due to better pollution controls in Asia, the Australian monsoon gets drier and the Asian monsoon gets wetter again, i.e. back to what it was like around 50 years ago.
• Most of the modelled future increases in rainfall in north Western Australia are in response to regional climate warming. But if pollution decreases over the Asian monsoon region, a warmer Asian monsoon region would draw rainfall northwards away from Australia. This would offset any increases in rainfall in north western Australian due to warming due to climate change.
• Hence the models that predict the greatest increase in rainfall do not fully include the effects of future declining pollution and aerosols, and may be overly optimistic about future rainfall projections.
• In summary, the reason there is such a wide variation in predicted future rainfall for north Australia between different climate models is that some just aren’t very good at modelling climate in our part of the world (they predict a much drier future) and some don’t include the effect of aerosols (they predict a much wetter future).
• This leaves us with probably little change in future rainfall in northern Australia.

What does this mean?

How has rainfall increased in north-western Australia?

What’s changed in the last 50 years?

What does this mean?

Catto, J.L., Jakob, C., and Nicholls, N. (2012) The influence of changes in synoptic regimes on north Australian wet season rainfall trends. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 117(D10). https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2012JD017472

Clark, S., Reeder, M., and Jakob, C. (2018) Rainfall regimes over north Western Australia. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 144(711), 458-467.