This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Bachelor reporting on El Nino in the southern hemisphere.

Jeremy Zachus in New South Wales. El Nino is upon them.

El Nino is upon us here in New England too, although we're in a different season.

So we're expecting very cold weather, it's already turned cold, and heavy snows that we've not seen for seven years at least.

In Australia, what they have is expectation of great heat, lots of dryness, severe bush fires, and now rain. What is this Jeremy? Where did the rain come from?

I wish I knew John, I wish I knew. And when I say rain rain it's not just any old heavy rain that we get on any winter

it is absolutely extremely heavy rain in fact we're expecting to get 100 millimeters over the next couple of days here in Sydney.

Now, 100 millimeters is about 4 inches of rain, which equates to flash flooding, which equates to devastating water in our drainage system which basically equates to all our

water tanks being full, which is great for the summer, but we shouldn't be getting rain.

I mean, we have an El Nino event and a positive Indian Ocean dipole event that should be making it completely

dry at this time of year but for whatever reason we now just have storms we have rain we just have

flash flooding expected all up and down to Eastern Seaboard.

And I should say too that Queensland itself as well is probably going to get 150 millimeters,

so another half again on top of what we have in Victoria down to our south probably around about 100

millimeters too so we are getting rain and honestly John this time a month ago I

did not expect us to be talking about rain obviously.

Yes, South Australia is getting hit.

Western Victoria is getting hit.

I see Sydney is just under the cloud layer and the coming down

Queensland. This is a continent. I've got to get used to the fact that you're a

whole continent. I think of it as a series of states like a

region of the US but no it's vast and you have different weather systems in

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