From the 1990s climate change has decreased cool season catchment precipitation reducing river heights in Australia’s southern Murray-Darling Basin

Abstract

The Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) is Australia’s major agricultural region. The southern MDB receives most of its annual catchment runoff during the cool season (April–September). Focusing on the Murrumbidgee River measurements at Wagga Wagga and further downstream at Hay, cool season river heights are available year to year. The 27-year period April–September Hay and Wagga Wagga river heights exhibit decreases between 1965 and 1991 and 1992–2018 not matched by declining April-September catchment rainfall. However, permutation tests of means and variances of late autumn (April–May) dam catchment precipitation and net inflows, produced p-values indicating a highly significant decline since the early 1990s. Consequently, dry catchments in late autumn, even with average cool season rainfall, have reduced dam inflows and decreased river heights downstream from Wagga Wagga, before water extraction for irrigation. It is concluded that lower April–September mean river heights at Wagga Wagga and decreased river height variability at Hay, since the mid-1990s, are due to combined lower April–May catchment precipitation and increased mean temperatures. Machine learning attribute detection revealed the southern MDB drivers as the southern annular mode (SAM), inter-decadal Pacific oscillation (IPO), Indian Ocean dipole (IOD) and global sea-surface temperature (GlobalSST). Continued catchment drying and warming will drastically reduce future water availability.