Australian Water and Energy Exchanges research initiative | OzEWEX is the Australian Energy and Wate, The extreme, recent drought has devastated many communities around the Murray-Darling Basin, but the processes driving drought are still not well understood.
Our new study helps to change this. We threw a weather model into reverse and ran it back for 35 years to study the natural processes leading to low rainfall during drought.
And we found the leading cause for drought in the Murray-Darling Basin was that moisture from oceans didn’t reach the basin as often as normal, and produced less.