Bushfire and flooding in Australia

I have stayed in Cairns, northeast seashore in Australia from middle of last week as originally planned. It is natural that there is much precipitation this time because of rainy season in tropical climate region, but it was special this year and rivers in the northern part of Queensland flooded due to heavy rain, and ferocious crocodiles moved from rivers to residential area of some town this year.

Since main roads from southern area flooded, tracks were not able to reach to Cairns and vegetables have been swept away in supermarket. Fortunately trunk roads became available just a day before my stay, there were rich foods and clean town and I did not imagine heavy flooding, and couldn't find influence by large flood. Although it was quite fine, weather reports of a TV is continuing passing forecast of cloudy and thunderstorm every day. I guess Australian doesn’t care weather forecast so much compared with Japanese.

On the other hand, huge bush fire, once in 100 years, continued and troops just deployed. in the southeast part (the State of Victoria) of Australian. I remember that ABC TV news reporters always spoke "it is still uncontrolled".

Southeastern Australia has many trees of the eucalyptus which a koala likes, and leaves contain a lot of oil. Therefore, it is said that the bushfire is a natural phenomenon of Australia (or the seeds of a eucalyptus carry out prout at the high temperature during bush fire.

Anyway, fire scale is getting large and only this also becomes a social problem from a thing with many persons who lost all of their property and their life, and warning and correspondence of the authorities having been overdue etc.

However bushfire happens in very large scale, and there are many persons who lost entire properties or even their life, and warning and right actions by authorities were postponed. It will be getting political issues later.

Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) is the keyword to know why such serious drought has happened in southeastern Australia. IOD is discovered by Dr. Yamagata, Program Director of Frontier Research Center for Global Change, JAMSTEC, et al., in 1999, and it was published in Nature.

Moreover, they succeeded in prediction of the dipole mode phenomena in Indian Ocean using Erath Simulator supercomputer in 2007. It was the first time in the world.

It is linked to reduction of disaster how deeply Australian government understands such research findings, and make progress in right actions against risk of drought.However, reality has already showed answer.


I expected an adventure travel this time. But anything happened. The only trouble is our flight (JetStar, known due to cheaper airfare) from Cairns that delayed almost 6 hours, and arrived in Osaka midnight instead of Tokyo.