We told you back on January 9 that Alice Springs and Uluru had copped a drenching, with over 100 mm of rainfall at the Alice over two days – one of which was the wettest January day in 22 years. Now take a squiz at the same region about seven weeks earlier. Beautiful green, green grass and other vegetation. Journal reference: Gondwana Research, doi.org/h9n.Take a look at that satellite image showing an unusual green blob in the Red Centre of Australia. “Data to really answer the question are few and far between,” Huber says.

However, climate models struggle with simulating such hot climates. Models by Matthew Huber of Purdue University in Indiana suggest that Eocene monsoons happened in the same places as monsoons today ( Journal of Asian Earth Sciences, doi.org/bg4c3j). She says major weather systems like the jet streams operate close to the poles, and could interfere with any new monsoons. But Jacques says monsoons could spring up on other continents. Even then, Antarctica is likely to stay frozen, so an Antarctic monsoon probably isn’t on the cards. Our climate futureĬould the monsoons also spread? It’s unlikely we’ll reach Eocene temperatures unless we burn fossil fuels well into the 2200s. Air pollution complicates the story by reducing monsoon rains. “In that sense the monsoon is stronger, but the circulation is weaker,” Martin says. Their best guess is that monsoon winds will diminish, but because warmer air holds more moisture the monsoon rains will get heavier, causing more floods ( Nature Climate Change, doi.org/h9p). “It can create new monsoon circulations.”Ĭlimatologists aren’t sure how monsoons will be affected by climate change. Today, this only happens in the tropics, but Jacques says that monsoons may proliferate in hotter climates. For this to happen, the land must warm up much more than the ocean during summer. Moist sea air blows onto the land during summer, while in winter the winds travel in reverse. Monsoon rains are driven by seasonal changes in wind direction. “It tends to be thought of as a tropical thing.”

Eocene Antarctica looks much the same as monsoon climates of south Asia today, where there is heavy rainfall in summer but the winters are dry.įinding a monsoon so close to the poles is unexpected, says Gill Martin of the UK Met Office in Exeter, UK. That suggests there was a monsoon on the continent.

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