Interdecadal cycles in Australian annual rainfall

Abstract

Extremes of Australian rainfall have profound economic, ecological and societal impacts; however, the current forecast horizon is limited to a few months. This study investigates interdecadal periodicity in annual rainfall records across eastern Australia. Wavelet analysis was conducted on rainfall data from 347 sites covering 130 years (1890-2020). Prominent cycles were extracted from each site and clustered using a Gaussian mixture model. This revealed three principal cycles centred around 12.9, 20.4 and 29.1 years that were highly significant over red noise using a t test (p<0.0001). Overall, the three cycles combined had a mean contribution to the total rainfall variance (R2) of 13 % across all of the sites, but this was up to 29 % at individual sites. Both the 12.9- and 20.4-year cycles were detected at over 95 % of the sites. The strength of each cycle varied over time, and this amplitude modulation of the signal showed a systematic movement across the area investigated. Eighty-six percent of extremely wet years fell within the positive phase of the combined reconstruction, with 80 % of extremely dry years falling in the negative phase. These results indicate underlying periodicity in annual rainfall across eastern Australia, with the potential to build this into long-term forecasts. This concept has been suggested in the past but has not been rigorously tested. These findings open new paths for research into rainfall patterns in Australia and internationally. They also have broad implications for the management of water resources across all sectors.