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If you live in southern Australia, you may have noticed it’s been a rather wet couple of months. What you might not realise is the role that the tropical Indian Ocean has played in helping to create this weather.

Since late May, the ocean has been in what we call a “negative Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) phase” – and it seems set to be one of the strongest such events in at least 15 years.

Compared to its Pacific cousins, El Niño and La Niña, the IOD is something of a mystery to many people. So what is it, and what does it mean for our climate, and does it explain why this winter has been such a wet one for many Australians?

What is the Indian Ocean Dipole?

The Indian Ocean Dipole is similar to the more famous El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in the Pacific. That system seesaws between El Niño conditions – characterised by a “warm blob” of surface waters in the eastern tropical Pacific – and La Niña, where the warm patch is in the western Pacific.

Similarly, the IOD is defined by the relative distribution of warmer-than-usual water across the tropical Indian Ocean. The system can flip between positive, neutral and negative phases, depending on the presence and position of these “temperature anomalies”.

When the temperatures in the west (off Africa) and the east (off Indonesia and Australia) are roughly normal, we call this a neutral IOD phase.

Explaining the Indian Ocean Dipole

The IOD enters a negative phase (as it did two months ago) when waters in the eastern Indian Ocean become significantly warmer than normal, while waters off Africa are cooler. This happens largely because of prevailing wind patterns.

The Earth’s rotation causes trade winds to blow from east to west, which push warmer surface waters across the Pacific and into the relatively shallow waters north of Australia. This warm water (often the warmest open ocean water in the world) causes a drop in atmospheric pressure over the western Pacific and eastern Indian oceans. In turn, this low pressure induces prevailing winds to blow across the tropical Indian Ocean from west to east.

When these westerly winds strengthen, they push surface waters (which are warmer than deeper water) towards Australia, while at the same time cooler waters are drawn up to the surface off Africa.

The resulting pattern – a blob of warmer-than-normal water in the east and a cooler-than-normal patch in the west – is termed a negative IOD phase. As you can see from the map below for the week ending July 17, we’re in a negative phase now – cooler waters can be seen near the Horn of Africa, and warmer waters near Sumatra.

These conditions increase tropical moisture and cloudiness near Australia. This typically leads to increased rainfall across the southern half of the continent (see below). Conversely, eastern Africa gets less rainfall than normal, which can lead to intense droughts and, at times, quite serious humanitarian impacts.

A negative IOD affects Australia’s temperatures as well as its rainfall. Across the southern mainland, cooler-than-average days are more likely from June to November, although overnight temperatures are generally normal. The snow season typically finishes later and with deeper peak snow, although these impacts are being modulated by climate change.

Meanwhile, Australia’s tropical north tends to get warmer-than-usual days and warmer nights too.

When will it end?

IOD events typically develop during late autumn or early winter, and peak in spring. They then decay rapidly as the monsoon trough arrives in the Southern Hemisphere around the end of spring, bringing a change in wind patterns that rapidly breaks down the IOD pattern. This means that the IOD typically has little influence during the Australian summer.

Are El Niño, La Niña and the IOD linked?

While it’s not always the case, a negative IOD is more likely to form during a La Niña year, while a positive IOD is more likely to form during El Niño.

Indeed, we experienced a combined positive IOD/El Niño event in 2015, which goes a long way to explaining the particularly poor rainfall in many parts of Australia last spring. Typically when the two events occur together, their effects on rainfall are reinforced.

The current state of play

The IOD has been in a negative phase for the past two months, and is likely to stay like that until the end of spring. Recent observations suggest it’s the strongest negative event in at least the past 15 years. What’s more, as of mid-July 2016, about half of international models suggest that La Niña may form later in the year.

So why should we care? The negative phase of the IOD has already influenced recent rainfall – last month was Australia’s second-wettest June in 117 years of national records. This is good news for some of the areas in Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia which were hit hard by the dry conditions associated with the 2015-16 El Niño.

It’s also likely that the negative IOD has contributed to the very warm conditions across northern Australia, which has seen several records set and even had an impact upon tropical crops such as mangoes, which require cool periods to set flower. And if La Niña does become established in the Pacific Ocean, we may have only seen the start of the wet weather.

Australia’s current climate outlook reflects the typical conditions expected during a negative IOD event. However, other factors are at play too, including the overall warming trend of Australia’s climate, the record warm Indian Ocean more generally, the tendency for our weather systems to be located more to the south, and even the occurrence of East Coast Lows which may be more likely this year due to a record warm Tasman Sea.

To stay up-to-date with the latest on the Indian Ocean Dipole, and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), please read our fortnightly ENSO Wrap-Up. We’ve also recently updated all of our Indian Ocean Dipole information, including a new list of historical IOD years, video and infographic.

Nothing to disclose.

Andrew B. Watkins, Catherine Ganter, David Jones, and Paul Gregory do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

The president of the Royal Society has called for the UK government to underwrite the research of all UK-based researchers who apply for EU funding now.

Campaigner who founded Tiggywinkles, the UK’s first wildlife hospital, and championed new approaches to helping injured and sick animals

Les Stocker, who has died aged 73, was an important friend to Britain’s wildlife, and to hedgehogs in particular. He began the process of giving wildlife care a solid foundation in this country, and founded the first wildlife hospital, Tiggywinkles, in Haddenham, Buckinghamshire.

Before Les began his work in the 1970s, the most common reaction of the veterinary profession to a wildlife casualty was to put an injured animal to sleep, but now there is a range of innovative approaches to the most obscure problems – from repairing birds’ beaks with glue to stitching on a toad’s tongue following a collision with a lawnmower. Les had to re-teach the toad how to use its tongue to catch insects.

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Dolly the sheep's "siblings" are generally healthy, a study has shown, providing hope that cloning can yield animals free from degenerative illness.

US agency’s declaration that jet engine exhaust endangers public health represents key milestone, reports Climate Central

The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday declared that jet engine exhaust endangers public health by contributing to climate change, a key milestone as it works to develop regulations that will cut carbon emissions from commercial aircraft.

Large commercial jets account for 11% of all emissions from the global transportation sector. Aircraft emissions are expected to grow by 50% by 2050 as demand for air travel increases.

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A new project in Sri Lanka offers training and loans to women to start sustainable businesses as an alternative to cutting mangroves, and commits them to help replant degraded areas of the mangrove forests

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New Zealand Prime Minister John Key has announced a radical new plan to rid the country of pests.

The era of solar and wind storage is already here, with Windlab to begin construction of world-leading wind-solar-battery storage complex in north Queensland.

Conservationists and law enforcement have struggled to catch the Walter Whites behind wildlife trafficking. But could some plastic eggs and GPS trackers change the game?

Sometimes life really does imitate art. In the fourth season of the hit TV show, Breaking Bad, police put GPS devices on barrels of methylamine to try and track the show’s protagonists to their meth lab. Inspired by the episode, Kim Williams-Guillen, a conservationist with Paso Pacifico, decided to take the concept one step further: what if you could catch wildlife poachers by slipping GPS devices into convincingly faked wildlife parts? In this case: Hollywood-inspired, high-tech sea turtle eggs; fake eggs so convincingly crafted that poachers would have a hard time distinguishing them from the real thing.

“Every year millions of sea turtle eggs are taken by poachers for sale on the black market. Paso Pacifico’s solution has the potential to reveal the trade routes and destination markets for trafficked sea turtle eggs,” the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) said.

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Solar Impulse 2 completes the first round-the-world flight powered by a renewable energy, landing in Abu Dhabi early on Tuesday. Piloted by Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, the solar-powered plane began its circumnavigation in March 2015 and has made 16 stops across the world without using any fuel

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Forests and other land-based carbon stores held onto more carbon during colder historical climates. Miguel.v/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

The dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels during the Little Ice Age wasn’t caused by New World pioneers cutting a swathe through native American agriculture, as had been previously thought.

Instead, our new analysis of the climate record contained within Antarctic ice cores suggests that the fall in atmospheric CO₂ levels during the cold period from 1500 to 1750 was driven by increased net uptake of carbon by plants.

This in turn suggests that if plants reacted to falling temperatures by taking up more carbon, they are likely to react to the current rising CO₂ levels by releasing yet more of it into the atmosphere.

Historical atmospheres

Atmospheric CO₂ concentrations were fairly stable from around 2000 years ago until the start of the Industrial Revolution, since when they have begun to climb dramatically. However, along the way were relatively small shifts, such as that seen during the Little Ice Age (LIA).

Carbon dioxide naturally cycles between the atmosphere, the land and the ocean. On land, it is removed from the atmosphere by plant photosynthesis and returned when plant material decomposes. Normally these processes balance out, but a change in the rate of one of these processes can shift atmospheric CO₂ levels to a new equilibrium.

If decomposition increases as it warms, this will slow or reverse the rebalancing uptake, leaving more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, warming the climate still further and so on, in a positive feedback.

The LIA corresponded with the start of European colonisation of the New World. European diseases devastated populations in the Americas, and one theory held that this led to a decrease in indigenous agriculture, which in turn let forests grow back and took up significant amounts of CO₂ from the atmosphere. This had been suggested as the first geologically recognisable signature of human impact on the globe, and thus the start of the Anthropocene epoch.

But was this actually the case? Our study suggests not, because while we can be relatively certain the LIA change in CO₂ levels was due to differences in the behaviour of land plants, our results suggest that the change was a response to the changing climate, and not to human-driven changes in vegetation cover.

Looking for clues

How can we tell? We know that the process involved terrestrial plants, because the atmosphere during the LIA was even lower in CO₂ containing the isotope carbon-12, which is preferred by photosynthesising plants.

But how do we know if the changes were due to changes in vegetation cover, or to climate feedbacks. To answer that we looked at another gas, carbonyl sulfide (COS), which is also trapped in air bubbles along with the carbon dioxide. This molecule has almost the same structure as CO₂, except one of the oxygen atoms is replaced with sulfur.

This is close enough to trick the plants, which take it up during photosynthesis. But unlike CO₂, COS it is not released when plant material decomposes so an increase in photosynthesis leads to a decrease in atmospheric COS.

This means that the “early Anthropocene” hypothesis has a testable consequence: it should have led to an observable reduction in COS concentrations within the ice cores. However, when we looked at the ice core record we found that there was an increase. This suggests that photosynthesis actually decreased during the LIA, rather than increasing as we would expect if the difference was due to forest regrowth.

This means that the drop in atmospheric CO₂ during the LIA was more likely to have been a direct response to the dipping temperatures. The cool climate of the LIA reduced photosynthesis but also slowed down plant respiration and decomposition, with the net effect that more CO₂ was taken up by the land biosphere during cool periods.

What about the future?

The flipside of this is that the reverse may happen when temperatures rise, as they are now. Rising temperatures are likely to mean even more CO₂ being released from the terrestrial biosphere. While plants continue to increase their photosynthesis as Earth warms, our findings suggest that plant decomposition will increase even more, meaning that less carbon stays in the soil.

This is concerning, because as we know, humans have opened the tap on a new source of carbon: fossil fuels that were previously locked away underground. We are rapidly returning lots of this stored carbon to the atmosphere, and the land and ocean are only removing about half of what we add.

Our discovery suggests that every degree increase in temperature will result in about 20 parts per million extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is about the middle of the expectation from climate models. It means that, if we want to keep global warming to within 2℃ of average pre-industrial temperatures, in line with the Paris climate agreement, we need to factor in this positive feedback loop, which means that the more temperatures climb, the more extra CO₂ will be released from the world’s landscapes.

Peter Rayner receives funding from Australian Research Council linkage grant.

Cathy Trudinger has received funding from the Australian Climate Change Science Program (a partnership between the Department of the Environment, the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO).

David Etheridge has received funding from the Australian Climate Change Science Program (a partnership between the Department of the Environment, the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO), from the University of Copenhagen, from the CO2CRC and from the Gas Industry Social and Environmental Research Alliance.

Mauro Rubino does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

The British photographer draws on a childhood playing in the New Forest for her images, and reminds us of a lost, near-mythical England

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A rare white humpback whale has been spotted off Australia's east coast travelling at a leisurely pace not far from the famous holiday town Byron Bay.

Thockrington, Northumberland Once, the church stood above a village; now there is just the church and a farm. A returning sailor brought cholera in 1847 and the village was wiped out, its houses burnt

From a distance the tiny buttressed church appears as a rocky outcrop, a crag jutting up from the hard dolerite of the Whin Sill. Behind its skyline silhouette, over the shoulder of the hill, the three-pointed stars of wind turbines swivel in the wind. I’m high up here, the view reaching far into the North Pennines. Grasses sway and buckle as I cross the field to open the wooden gate. My hair is whipped across my face as I lower the age-smoothed latch.

The church of St Aidan’s at Thockrington is one of the oldest in Northumberland. Once, it stood above a village; now there is just the church and a farm. A returning sailor brought cholera in 1847 and the village was wiped out, its houses burnt. A drystone wall zigzags around the knoll of the churchyard, an angled enclosure with sparse memorials, randomly placed. I came here thirty years ago to record the flora. Today the grass has been cut, the hay taken off and piled up against the inside of the boundary walls. Fresh leaves are emerging in the turf: red clover, cow parsley, sorrel, vetch and plantain.

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On World Mangrove Day, Sri Lanka's prime minister says mangroves' ability to swiftly absorb carbon make them vital in the fight to curb climate change.

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Clean Energy Finance Corp marks 3rd year of operation with record investment level, plus 73% year-on-year increase in value of new investment commitments.

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