Reduced moisture sources contributed to the 2017-2019 southeast Australian drought

Abstract

The Murray Darling Basin, located in southeast Australia, is an agriculturally rich area, providing one-third of the country’ food supply. In 2017-2019 the region experienced one of its worst droughts since 1900. Rainfall in the Murray Darling Basin was consistently below average for three consecutive cool seasons, an unprecedented event on record. The drought set the extreme conditions that led later to the 2019-2020 Black Summer Bushfires. Previous studies suggest that the strong 2019 positive Indian Ocean Dipole intensified the conditions of the drought, however the state of the climate drivers cannot fully explain the onset and development of the Murray Darling Basin drought. In this study, we investigate processes other than remote climate drivers that may have triggered the drought. Using a Lagrangian model to backtrack moisture sources to southeast Australia, we show that local processes were crucial in explaining the onset and development of the drought. We identify the sources of moisture to the cool season precipitation over the Murray Darling Basin and show for the first time that the moisture supply from the Tasman Sea declined in 2017 and 2018. We further show that the expected moisture was instead transported northward by an anomalous anticyclonic circulation. Our results provide an explanation for the moisture and rainfall deficit that caused the 2017-19 drought. Understanding the processes that led to the 2017-2019 Murray Darling Basin drought is important for predicting and planning future multi-year droughts in Australia.