The agricultural industry continues to buzz with chatter of a looming La Nina season, with one well regarded forecaster now predicting a La Nina for 2024 as more likely than either El Nino or neutral conditions.
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The current official outlook from the Bureau of Meteorology is for the El Nino to persist in the short term, but a number of private forecasting services have predicted a quick reversal to La Nina conditions, correlated with wetter than average conditions in Australia.
This follows the current El Nino event that saw an anomalously wet summer over eastern Australia.
Weatherzone said while it was too early to give a definitive prediction for next year after the current El Nino declines, there was a significant chance that the Pacific Ocean returns to a La Nina state by spring this year, increasing the chances of wet weather across eastern Australia in spring and summer.
The odds of La Nina are higher than either neutral or El Nino conditions according to computer models.
Weatherzone said examples of quick changes in the Pacific Ocean had occurred in the past.
"The 2010/2011 La Nina event demonstrates that such a short turnaround can happen, and computer models have been consistently predicting La Nina as more likely than either El Nio or neutral conditions," the organisation said.
One example of this was in 2009-10 when an El Nino contributed to a dry winter and spring but then, despite the El Nino, much of eastern and central Australia experienced an unusually wet summer.
It then broke down and the unusually strong 2010-11 La Nina event developed.
In terms of the current weather pattern, where east coast rainfall patterns are in contradiction of the normal drier than average weather seen with El Nino, the BoM said that while El Nino was associated with drier weather this applied less during the summer, especially in the east when high impact rainfall events can form during the tropical storm season in spite of dry conditions overall.
This week there have been falls of over 150mm in central Victoria, while December saw record flooding in far north Queensland and damaging storms in that state's south-east.
The BOM is tipping the El Nino event to persist, potentially into early autumn, however even with the El Nino in place it is tipping a wetter than average January to March period across Victoria, most of NSW, southern and south-east Queensland, eastern SA and eastern Tasmania.
For southern regions, with low average summer rainfall, the heavy falls from this week's system alone would be enough to push rainfall figures above average for the three month period.
On the other hand below median rainfall is likely to very likely, 60pc to greater than 80pc chance, for northern and western WA and north-east Queensland.
The BoM said past accuracy of January to March long-range forecasts for the chance of above median rainfall is moderate to high for most of Australia,