Rain, rain

The weather bureau seems to have predicted levels of rain in Queensland pretty well for the last two summers. Last year, based on high sea temperatures and the strong La Nina, they predicted a very wet summer, and were right. This year, they predicted a pretty-wet-but-almost-certainly-not-as-wet-as-last-summer summer, and it seems to be coming true.

Certain parts of the state are getting some record falls, though:

Senior hydrologist Jim Stewart says records going back to 1884 for the Paroo River have been broken, with extraordinary rainfall totals over the weekend....

THE Gold Coast is smashing January weather records after the big downpour in the Hinterland and the border.

Coolangatta yesterday set a record for January rainfall of 479.6mm, up from 392.8 in 2006.
Springbrook on the wet and wild Wednesday received 291mm, easily breaking the 2008 daily record for January of 265mm.

And I see that over in New Zealand, it's been a particularly wet summer, in parts:

Hardest-hit were Nelson and Takaka, where flooding plagued the region for most of the month causing slips, road closures and evacuations.

Nelson was soaked with six times its normal rainfall, while Takaka had eight times its usual.

Both recorded their highest December totals since records began in 1941 and 1976 respectively, with 446mm of water hitting Nelson and 1103mm pouring down on Takaka.

Takaka also recorded its highest ever one-day rainfall, on December 14, with 392mm flooding the town - beating its previous record of 259 mm recorded in November 1990.

Yet other parts of the country had little rain:

Conversely, the winds caused the southwest to be warm, dry and sunny. Rainfall there was well below normal, Niwa said.

A bit reminiscent of the unusual situation in the US last with Texas in severe drought, but the Mississippi having record floods.

So, it's interesting to note that a recent report on climate change in England predicts that:

Flooding is the greatest threat to the UK posed by climate change, with up to 3.6 million people at risk by the middle of the century, according to a report published on Thursday by the environment department.
The first comprehensive climate change risk assessment for the UK identifies hundreds of ways rising global temperatures will have an impact if no action is taken. They include the financial damage caused by flooding, which would increase to £2bn-£10bn a year by 2080, more deaths in heatwaves, and large-scale water shortages by mid-century.

Note again that the forecast is for more problem flooding, but also water shortages. It's all to do with intensification of the hydrological cycle, a concept the climate change skeptics have trouble acknowledging as having been predicted years ago as part of AGW. Funny how the newspapers seem to provide evidence for it, though.*

* OK, OK, just reading about the odd record being broken in rainfall here and there doesn't prove anything scientifically. No doubt proper analysis needs to be done, and rainfall statistics can be cut and sliced many ways, as can temperature records, so that some "record breaking" figures may not seem so impressive on closer analysis. On the other hand, I am struck by the way some records are being broken by very large margins indeed, and that in particular is what makes me suspect that later analysis is going to prove the intensification of the hydrological cycle, as predicted by climate scientists.