Australia won't see a 'winter' by 2050: study

The four seasons will be reduced to three: spring, autumn, and "new summer."

(Web Desk) – A team of scientists and designers recently teamed up to create a tool that would show Australians what the climate is expected to be like in their cities by 2050 - and it led to a startling discovery that winter will no longer exist in Australia.

"In 30 years’ time, winter as we know it will be non-existent," researcher Geoff Hinchliffe said in a press release - revealing yet another way climate change is poised to dramatically alter life on Earth.

The four seasons will be reduced to three: spring, autumn, and “new summer.” Temperatures during new summer are forecast consistently to peak above 40° C (about 104° F) for sustained periods.

To communicate the data behind these projections, a team of designers at Australian National University’s School of Art & Design (SOAD) created a visualization tool that shows how much the average temperature will rise at thousands of places in the country and how many more days of temperatures above 30° C and 40° C people can expect by 2050.

They relied on data from the Bureau of Meteorology and Scientific Information for Land Owners for their project.

Once it had compiled the data, the SOAD team sought a way to present it that would most resonate with the public.

"That meant using colour, shape, and size around a dial composition showing a whole year’s worth of temperature values in a single snapshot," Hinchliffe said.

"It makes it visually rich and interesting and gives a lot of detail in a way that connects emotionally with people by locating it in their own town."

While creating the tool, the team noticed that the projections didn’t follow the pattern of our current four seasons.

Dr. Geoff Hinchliffe, a senior lecturer at SOAD, described the team’s work: “We looked at the historical average temperatures of each season and compared them to the projected data and what we find everywhere is that there’s really no period of a sustained or lasting winter. In 30 years’ time winter as we know it will be non-existent. It ceases to be everywhere apart from a few places in Tasmania.”

Instead of winter, the researchers believe Australians will experience spring, autumn, and a longer season they’re calling "new summer".

During this new season, temperatures will consistently peak above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) for sustained periods of time, based on predictions.

Using the researchers’ visualization tool to look at the climate near Melbourne in 2050, temperatures in the suburb of Burnley are expected to be 3.2° C (5.7° F) hotter than the 30-year average for 1960 to 1990 with 21% less average rainfall.

Temperatures will rise above 30° C on 52 days of the year, 20 days more than the 30-year average, and rise above 40° C on six days, five more than the current average.