The Great Lakes Zephyr - Wind Energy & Hydrogen Journal

Now from ENN, dire news for Austrailia:

Wednesday, September 24, 2003
By Michael Byrnes, Reuters


SYDNEY — 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 (160 km) -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," said Dr. James Risbey of the Center for Dynamical Meteorology and Oceanography at Melbourne's Monash University. "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.

Australia, one of the world's top agricultural supply nations, has just been through its worst drought in 100 years. Risbey and other Australians are part of an international band of scientists and meteorologists focusing on the vortex as an explanation for declining rainfall.

Rainfall has declined by nearly 20 percent in the past seven years over parts of southwestern Western Australia, through to Victoria and into southern New South Wales state, Risbey said. At the same time, temperatures have...(Read on in: Scientists see Antarctic vortex as drought maker)