Wet Weather

 

There's been a great deal of coverage of Queensland's most recent floods, particularly the effects on the town of St George. It has been so wet that the flood is literally visible from space. NASA satellites have taken images of the area. The image below is from February 6, 2012. Comparison images, and larger versions are available on the NASA Earth Observatory website.

 

Stgeorge

 

In the wider perspective it's also been extraordinarily wet across Australia in recent years. The Bureau of Meteorology recently released Special Statement that 2010-2011 was the wettest two-year period in Australian history. As shown in the Bureau's Annual Australian Climate Statement, there have been wetter individual years, such as 1974, during previous El-Nino periods, but 2010 and 2011 brought the heaviest back-to-back years of rainfall.

 

Annual Rainfall