Hi, BTN, I'm Lacey Duguit, and I live on a farm
just outside of Gooloogong, New South Wales.
The weather has been pretty crazy this past week.
We've had lots of rain, almost 130 mils so far.
The caravan park
and other low-lying sites in Cowra had to be evacuated.
I can't go to school until the water goes down.
This is the road I need to take to get to school.
If you live in New South Wales, like Lacey,
or in Queensland,
or South Australia,
or basically anywhere across Australia's East Coast,
you might have noticed some pretty wild weather
these past few weeks.
(THUNDER CRASHES)
(INDISTINCT SHOUTING)
If you haven't noticed,
you might have been living under a rock...
(RAIN PATTERS)
..which, I guess, would provide pretty good protection
from all this rain.
In fact, some towns got a month's worth of downpour
in just a couple of days,
enough to turn the Wyangala Dam from this...
..into this.
All that extra water burst the banks of the Lachlan River,
flooding farms and threatening towns.
It's incredible how high it is,
but if it goes any higher, it might not be incredible.
It might be dangerous.
In Victoria, emergency services have been working overtime
while South Australia shivered its way
through its coldest November day in 28 years.
Oh, and if you think that's cold,
well, in Hobart it snowed.
Yep. Snow.
In November. (MIAOWING)
Ah-ha! Ah-ha! Argh!
Oh, my God!
This isn't the sort of weather you necessarily expect
two weeks out from summer.
So, what on Earth is going on?
NATE BYRNE: Well, we're in a transitional time at the moment,
and that means that we've got lots of warm, humid air around
at the moment and something to help cause showers and storms.
Check your weather. Nate. Got quite a lot going on
on both sides of the country...
That's Nate Byrne.
You might recognise him from, well, the weather.
Plenty of snow around.
And he says cold fronts, which are big patches of cold air,
can suck lots of warm, moist water into the atmosphere,
creating lots of cloud and rain, just like we've seen.
But there is another reason
we should expect a bit more wild weather this summer.
La Nina is certainly having an effect
on the weather we're seeing at the moment.
Yep. La Nina.
Do you remember what that is?
It's a weather pattern that we see
from time to time,
when the trade winds that blow
across the Pacific are extra strong
and bring more warm water
from the east to the west.
That means we can have more showers and thunderstorms,
more flooding events, and also more cyclones.
While La Nina can be good news
for farmers who haven't had much rain in a while,
too much rain can be bad news.
We've got about 104 acres here, and it's all under water.
To be wiped out this year is going to be devastating.
Farms in New South Wales flooded last week after the heavy rain,
causing lots of damage.
A lot of the crops we were going to contract harvest
are now under water in Gooloogong.
It will cost people hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses.
While experts say we're not officially
into a La Nina phase just yet,
there will be a higher risk of flooding this summer.
So, while this might be the first batch of wild weather
to round out the year,
it, more than likely, won't be the last.