Australian Drought Ending?
I’ve been experiencing an old famliar pattern of summer storms this week which makes me wonder if the Australian drought conditions are headed towards a turn-around soon. The days have been sunny and then evolving into thunderstorms towards the afternoon/evenings. It definitely feels like something very familiar is “returning”.
The flash flooding we experienced here & here mid february with 295mm of rain across two days was clearly a record since my year of living here.
My first suspsicions of possible weather changes coming up was sparked by the flowering of a succulent that my mother received as a cutting from an old neighbour a long time ago. It hadn’t flowered in 18 years. It made me wonder what could be the cause that triggered the plant into flowering as it didn’t seem like the quality of soil was the cause.
The pursuit to find out possible triggers made me stumble across the god of flowers & the Mayan Calendar ending in 2012. That’s what left me wondering if perhaps this plant was responding to a natural cycle of something beyond the seasons, something longer - so that’s what made me wonder if something like El Nino / La Nina could’ve been responsible.
I’ve been wondering if the drought would begin to slowly turn eversince, and i think it could be beginning it’s journey now. Perhaps not directly addressing the drought at first, but I’m suspecting there could be more rain on the way slowly emerging this year, with the possibility of too much rain to follow.
Who knows. Perhaps we will with time.
I have this old memory of how much it used to rain in the late 70s - early 80s as a child. I remember how wet it was. I also remember how people used to have such colourful looking umbrellas too. These days, they tend to be a rather generic boring black! Why is that? Was it because it did rain so much once upon a time that we manufactured colourful umbrellas to cheer ourselves up a bit? Maybe it was an offshoot from the flower power of the 60s? Or maybe the popularity of Kermit The Frog’s Rainbow Connection song at the time? Did we see more rainbows back then? Do they have more colourful rainbows in places like England where it normally rains a lot right now?
It does feel like rain has been on the increase for me this last year, although that’s been slightly complicated for me because i moved from Sydney to Leura and that’s a big constrast in conditions of climate via the dramatic change in altitude. Will certainly gain a better picture with my second year here to make a comparison nevertheless.
Looking forward to more rainbows …and flowers too. Fingers crossed. 
