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A climatology of meteorological droughts in New England, Australia, 1880–2022

Linden Ashcroft , Mathilde Ritman , Howard Bridgman, Kenneth Thornton, Gionni Di Gravio, William Oates, Richard Belfield, Elspeth Belfield

Abstract

From 2017 to 2019, vast swathes of eastern Australia were affected by the severe and devastating Tinderbox Drought. New South Wales recorded its driest three-year period since national records began in 1900, and particularly severe rainfall and soil moisture deficits occurred in the New England region and wider northern Murray Darling Basin. To provide regional understanding of the relative severity of the Tinderbox Drought, here we present the first extended drought climatology for New England, spanning 1880 to 2022. Using this climatology explore trends in drought characteristics over the past 142 years. We make use of newly recovered historical data, observational temperature and rainfall observations, the latest version of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s gridded rainfall dataset, as well as a global gridded extreme dataset to assess changes in extreme precipitation signatures as well as extreme temperature events during droughts. Our analysis identifies 32 meteorological droughts from 1880 to 2022, ranging from seven months to over seven years in length. The climatology also reveals a change in the nature of drought over the region, with a shift from events characterised by warm season rainfall deficiencies to events with greater rainfall reduction in the cool half of the year. Despite the identified shift towards cool season droughts, we also find a significant decrease in the number of cold extremes that occur during droughts, as well as an increase in hot extremes. Droughts in New England have been generally associated with a greater than average frequency of cold nights and frost days, but this relationship has weakened over recent decades. Conversely, New England droughts are generally associated with a greater than average frequency of hot days, a relationship that has increased over time. The Tinderbox Drought was the second-most extreme meteorological drought for New England in terms of rainfall deficit and drought severity, and was associated with the highest number of extreme warm temperature events. The new drought climatology for New England can now be used to provide regional drought information for decision makers and the community.

ES25013  Accepted 02 September 2025

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