Bushfires strike with extreme heatwave blanketing most of Australia

Indymedia.org (Australia): Hobart recorded it's highest recorded minimum temperature Thursday night and highest recorded daytime temperature on Friday. Bushfires are currently raging in Tasmania destroying houses and forcing evacuations (see below).

....Elevated temperatures in an extreme heatwave are occuring across a brought sweep of Australia, with the heatwave expected to last at least a week. It is very unusual that a heat wave covers such a large area of the continent at one time, according to Karl Braganza, manager of climate monitoring at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Australia's weather has switched to hot and dry after one of the wettest two year periods in Australia's history influenced by an extremely strong La Nina event.

Over the southern winter and spring weak El Nino conditions have caused below average rainfall across much of Australia with a heatwave and above average temperatures in early Spring. An extreme summer heatwave is forecast to happen from January 3 over a wide area of Australia, particularly central inland areas, lasting for at least a week.

"We have a major heat event under way," Karl Braganza, manager of climate monitoring at the Bureau of Meteorology, said. "There are not many instances in the historical record where you get a heat event covering such a large area of the continent."

Brett Dutschke, senior meteorologist at Weatherzone, said it was unusual to have so prolonged a hot spell. "It's a once-in-20 or 30-year heatwave event in desert areas," he said. "More populated areas further south … are going to experience some of this as well."....

The Red Center in Australia, shot by Gabriele Delhey (GDelhey), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license