A successful long-range weather expert is urging people to prepare for some extremely wild conditions in coming years.
It comes amid fluctuating temperatures and a furious storm already this summer, so high interest in the weather is again at a peak.
Fourth generation forecaster Hayden Walker, the son of renowned weather pundit Lennox Walker, expected significant climate events.
“People need to be mindful and prepared for 2024 and 2025,” he said.
“It’s going to be very wet.”
Mr Walker studies sunspots and sun flares to predict the weather for months, and sometimes years, in advance.
“We’re in solar cycle 25 and it’s only going to increase in intensity during the next couple of years,” he said.
“It will be highly, unusually wet for the eastern seaboard, not just for Queensland, but also for New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia.
“There will be a fair bit of rain to present itself during the next couple of years.”
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Mr Walker said there could be more events like the one that occurred earlier this year, when flooding occurred in South-East Queensland. Flooding has continued in many areas of New South Wales.
“I’m just putting an advisory out now,” he said.
“We (Hayden Walkers Weather organisation) forecast so people can plan and prepare ahead.”
Solar cycles are 11-year cycles, when activity on the sun’s surface increases and then decreases.
The Solar Cycle 25 Prediction Panel, an international group of experts, expected the peak of the current cycle to occur about July 2025.
While The Bureau of Meteorology does not provide forecasts that far in advance, it did expect much of the east coast to get considerable rainfall within the next three months.
BOM maps show most of the coastline have a greater than 60 per cent chance of exceeding median rainfall.
Bureau forecaster Danny Johnson told Sunshine Coast News recently that the region was in for a wet summer.
“It should be … hot, humid days and thunderstorms that roll across in the afternoons,” Mr Johnson said.
“We’re still in a La Nina phase, which increases the chance of above average rainfall (in summer).”
Mr Walker also expected a particularly wet season.
“There should be rain and storms for many areas of South-East Queensland,” he said.
“There should be storm activity for December in particular (on the Sunshine Coast).”
Read a related story: Storm update: ‘Like a train going through; most wind in 30 years’
Hayden has been successful in predicting many major weather events, including cyclones Larry, Yasi, Marcia and Olwyn and flooding and storm activity in Queensland and New South Wales.
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