Summer records fall after long heatwave - Sydney Morning Herald

Heat was on. Summer of 2012/13 goes down in the record books as the hottest ever. Photo: Glenn Campbell

Australia's summer of extreme weather has claimed another record with the country posting its hottest December-February period ever.

• Driest in decades for Victoria


• Wet start to autumn for NSW

The Bureau of Meteorology said the average temperature across the nation was 28.6 degrees, 1.1 degrees above normal, shading the previous summer record of 1997-98 by 0.1 degrees.

A slew of other summer records also fell, with a new daytime average maximum of 35.7 degrees, 1.4 degrees above normal and 0.2 degrees above the previous high set in 1982/83, the bureau said.

The intense heat across much of the nation in January - the hottest month on record - helped set the season up for the record burst. The September-February period is also the hottest since records began.

Perhaps most remarkably, though, the records fell even though the dominant El Nino-Southern Oscillation weather pattern over the Pacific remained in a neutral phase. The two previous record summers were both El Nino years, as were six of the hottest nine.

“On average over Australia, El Nino years tend to come out with a warmer summer,” Andrew Watkins, manager of climate prediction services at the bureau, said. “The January heatwave was off the scale when you look at the successive days of high temperatures.”

Fourteen of the 112 locations deployed by the weather bureau to monitor the long-term climate broke records for the hottest day, the most in any summer. Sydney with its 45.8 degrees and Hobart at 41.8 degrees registered their hottest days.

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