In Australia, it usually means heavy rainfall and flooding. La Niña events can influence weather in different ways across the planet. One reason for the wetness is likely La Niña, which has returned for three consecutive years. Time is also a factor, as rainfall accumulations from months past can influence current groundwater levels. The extent to which such rainfall affects the groundwater level varies by location and depends on a range of factors such as soil type, aquifer depth, and vegetation. Blue areas have more abundant water than usual, and orange and red areas have less. The colors depict the wetness percentile that is, how the levels of groundwater compare to long-term records (1948–2012). The map above depicts shallow groundwater storage in Australia from November 11–14, 2022, as measured by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) satellites. Water that seeps deep into the soil can influence groundwater levels for months. Emergency responders have rescued hundreds of people stranded by flood waters across the region. With soils already saturated, rainfall in November quickly led to flash flooding across New South Wales and Victoria. It’s a very complicated system of rivers and creeks that all feed. October 2022 was the wettest October on record in the Murray-Darling basin, an area that includes the permanent and impermanent rivers and streams pictured above. The area north of the Great Dividing Range in Victoria is a vast floodplain, Cook said. Forbes saw its third major flood event in just four weeks as waters on the Lachlan River rose faster than expected. The abundant rain across the region caused rivers to rise and flood nearby towns.
It saw 118 millimeters (4.6 inches) fall in a 24-hour period spanning November 13–14. The town of Forbes, New South Wales, had the highest daily total for the week. In the week leading up to November 14, large parts of New South Wales and Victoria saw more than 50 millimeters of rain (2 inches). For comparison, the MODIS image from the Aqua satellite (left) shows the same area on June 28, 2022, prior to the excessive rainfall. Vegetation is green and bare land is brown. Widespread flooding is visible in this false-color image (right) acquired on November 18, 2022, with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. With soils already saturated and dams full, the latest storms have added to ongoing flooding across New South Wales and Victoria. After an extremely wet October, southeast Australia continued to see heavy rainfall in November 2022.
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