Scientists See Antarctic Vortex as Drought Maker
Tue September 23, 2003 05:04 AM ET
By Michael Byrnes
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia may be facing a permanent drought because of an accelerating vortex of winds whipping around the Antarctic that threatens to disrupt rainfall, scientists said on Tuesday.
Spinning faster and tighter, the 100 mile an hour jetstream is pulling climate bands south and dragging rain from Australia into the Southern Ocean, they say.
They attribute the phenomenon to global warming and loss of the ozone layer over Antarctica.
"This is a very serious situation that we're probably not confronting as full-on as we should," Dr James Risbey of the Center for Dynamical Meteorology and Oceanography at Melbourne's Monash University told Reuters on Tuesday.
"There has been real added impetus here in Australia to try to study (the wind vortex) because we've been faced with an almost precipitous rainfall decline, particularly in the southwest of Western Australia," Risbey said.
REUTERS