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For weather news as it breaks that is tagged and organised, use the links on the Weather and Climate Media Reports page.

Friday 3 March 2017

Australian weather briefs

• There's a moderate chance a Tropical Cyclone will develop north of Darwin on Sunday, increasing to a high chance by Monday according to the BoM Tropical Cyclone Warning Centre in Darwin. The cyclone, which would be named TC Blanche, is expected to form from a tropical low which was 545km NNE of Darwin at 16.45 CST moving south and turning SW later. Heavy rain is expected in the Darwin area at the weekend with falls in the 200 to 300mm range. Follow the situation on the Bureau's Current Tropical Cyclones page.
• Water flowed into Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre in mid-February along the Warburton Groove, a 13km-long depression in the lake's salt surface that connects the Diamantina River to the lake via the Warburton River. This image from the International Space Station show the beautiful patina of colours as it spread down the groove. (NASA Earth Observatory)
• Some dramatic storm photos have graced the BoM Facebook page and ABC News in the past few days. This photo near Mullewa WA, NE of Geraldton, shows a shelf cloud attached to the base of a large cumulonimbus storm cloud dragging a curtain of torrential rain across the brown, wide landscape on 13 February. Last Wednesday, this perfectly-formed cumulonimbus thunderhead in an otherwise clear sky in the Barossa Valley SA had cameras clicking all over Adelaide, providing some spectacular photos for an ABC News report. And a lightning show over Perth on Wednesday night created another photographic frenzy, not to mention 7,000 properties blacked out, delays to planes and trains and a house fire.
• Speaking of storms, those that dropped unwelcome hailstones up to cricket ball size across Sydney on two consecutive days a couple of weekends ago (AWN here and here) have generated 48,000 insurance claims for $186 million and counting (ABC News)
• The WA Kimberley's wettest wet season since reliable rainfall records began in 1900 is coming to an end, with many location reporting twice or more their average wet season rainfall. Here's a rundown on an extraordinary season from ABC Rural, followed by some videos and photos showing the country in all its spendour.

Climate & climate change briefs

• A US study has found that 347 of the 1,437 native bee species for which it had sufficient data were at risk of extinction with a further 749 declining. Habitat loss, heavy pesticide use, climate change and increasing urbanisation were the main causes reported Reuters, noting the valuable services bees provide in pollination.
• Meanwhile, a survey of studies has found that the effect of climate change on endangered species has been wildly underestimated, reports Scientific American. The survey finds that 47% of mammals and 24.4% of the birds on the "red list" kept by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) were in imminent danger, about 700 species in all and about six times more than previously thought.
  
  James Watson, researcher at the University of Queensland, said "I think that’s a real problem with how the scientific community has communicated the issue, because people are always labelling it as a future threat. When you combine the evidence, the impact on species is already really dramatic." There's more detail on the survey of 130 studies published in Nature Climate Change journal in this Guardian article.
• We are already seeing some plants, animals and butterflies migrate to higher elevations or towards the poles to get refuge from unfavourable hot and dry conditions caused by climate change, sometimes in as little as the past 25 years. In The Conversation, Matt Christmas, ARC Research Associate at the University of Adelaide, looks at the combined impacts of the rapid rate of temperature increase and the reduction and sometimes non-existence of refuges.
• Another problem faced by native plants and animals has been the increasing spread of alien species. An IUCN report says that of 17,000 alien species introduced in the past 200 years, over a third have been introduced since 1970.