AUSTRALIA’S Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) announced yesterday that a La Nina event had established itself in the tropical Pacific, spelling a stormy summer for much of Australia’s east.

The BoM’s climate modeling suggested that the event would likely last through to the beginning of Australia’s autumn in March.

Meaning “the girl” in Spanish, La Nina is a complex weather phenomenon that occurs every few years.

Extreme weather expert Milton Speer from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) told Xinhua the announcement was of little surprise given the type of weather Australia’s eastern states had already been experiencing.

Parts of the states of New South Wales (NSW), Queensland and Victoria have already experienced heavy rains and flooding, with the BoM announcing that October rain levels were 8 percent above normal levels.

Further to this, the BoM recorded its first tropical cyclone, Cyclone Paddy, yesterday morning off the coast of Christmas Island above Australia’s northwest coast.

Speer told Xinhua that higher ocean surface temperatures to Australia’s north had been a strong sign of the coming event.

“Sea surface temperatures, right across the top of Australia, have been pretty anomalous.”

(Xinhua)