Identification

Title

Unprecedented high northern Australian streamflow linked to an intensification of the Indo-Australian monsoon

Abstract

Streamflow in Australia's northern rivers has been steadily increasing since the 1970s, most likely due to increased intensity in the Indo-Australian monsoon. However, because of limited data availability, it is hard to assess this recent trend and therefore contextualize potential future climatic changes. In this study, we used a network of 63 precipitation-sensitive tree-ring chronologies from the Indo-Australian and Asian monsoon regions to reconstruct streamflow in the Daly catchment in the Northern Territory of Australia from 1413 to 2005 CE. We used a novel wavelet-based method to transform the variance structure of the tree-ring chronologies to better match the hydroclimate prior to reconstruction with a hierarchical Bayesian regression model. Our streamflow reconstruction accounts for 72%-78% of the variance in the instrumental period and closely matches both historical flood events and independent proxy records, increasing confidence in its validity. We find that while streamflow has been increasing since the 1800s, the most recent 40-year period is unprecedented in the last similar to 600 years. Comparison to an independent coral-based streamflow record shows regional coherency in this trend. Extreme high flows were found to be linked to La Nina events, but we found no significant relationship between streamflow and El Nino events, or streamflow and other regional climatic drivers. More work is therefore needed to understand the drivers of the recent streamflow increase, but, regardless of the cause, water managers should be aware of the paleoclimatic context before making decisions on water allocations.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7mk6hp1

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2022-03-16T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact