Australia sweats in heatwave lifting bushfire risk, amid El Nino

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SYDNEY - Large swathes of Australia sweltered in a heatwave on Jan 21, the nation's weather forecaster said, raising a bushfire risk in an already high-risk fire season amid an El Nino weather pattern.

Heatwave alerts at "extreme" level, the highest danger rating, were in place for a second day for parts of Western Australia and were extended to South Australia, while areas of Queensland, New South Wales and the Northern Territory were under warnings rated as "severe", the weather forecaster said.

It cautioned that in Western Australia, the nation's largest state, the remote Pilbara and Gascoyne areas could experience temperatures in the high 40s on Jan 21. About 1,500km north of state capital Perth, in the Pilbara mining town of Paraburdoo, a maximum temperature of 48 deg C was forecast, more than 7 deg C above the average January maximum, according to forecaster data. It was 31.1 deg C there at 6.30am local time.

Australia's highest temperature on record, 50.7 deg C, was logged at Pilbara's Onslow Airport on Jan 13, 2022.

On the east coast, parts of New South Wales' capital, Sydney, were forecast on Jan 21 to reach 40 deg C, almost 10 deg C above the average January maximum.

The hot, dry conditions raised the risk of bushfires in some areas, the weather forecaster said, as Australia endures an El Nino weather event, typically associated with extreme phenomena such as wildfires, cyclones and droughts.

The last two bushfire seasons in Australia have been subdued compared with the 2019-2020 "Black Summer" when bushfires destroyed an area the size of Turkey and killed 33 people, three billion animals and trillions of invertebrates.

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