Brisbane Underwater

This is a news story that has been across the world over the past couple of days so I won't go over the details apart from an interesting fact:

The area of Queensland underwater is bigger than France and Germany, thats a lot of water.

I've had my first scientific paper accepted for publication (subject to a major revision of course), which, as its on the subject of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) now makes me qualified to talk about the flooding on a scientific level.  I went over the fact we're in a La Nina year in a previous post on the rain in Canberra at the start of December and the flooding in Queensland is an extension of that.  Rainfall in Australia should return to normal levels by April.

However I focused on sea surface temperatures, which, as this very interesting article discusses, may not be the whole story: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/42858.html
The strength of a La Nina is typically measured by the sea-surface temperature in the eastern equatorial Pacific which as this page demonstrates (http://ggweather.com/enso/oni.htm), is lower than we've had it for a reasonable but not a long time. However as the planet is warming up the baseline of temperatures is rising. Thus the absolute temperature may not be drastically low, but the anomaly may be larger than it appears as its dropping from a now higher baseline.  Thus it is the ocean pressures (the southern oscillation part of ENSO, typically measured as the air pressure difference between Tahiti and Darwin) which reveal that this year may actually be a big big event, the biggest since 1917 (http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/soihtm1.shtml), as these are recording a much larger anomaly, and help control the actual weather that this climatic phenomenon tends to cause.  This is the kind of thing I find interesting! (Although I feel that those people writing the comments section ought to be shot for stupidity, the article is hardly about global warming, the fact we have a strong La Nina has nothing (probably) to do with the changing climate, its just how we measure it that we're having to adapt (surely proof in itself that the climate is getting hotter if we're having to change how we measure things to cope)  Grrrr!)

Of course its not just Queensland underwater.  The second major story on the news tonight was the floods in Victoria, the third was flooding in Tasmania, and the fourth was flooding in New South Wales.  The floods in Brazil came in about eighth!