What happened to Australia’s snow season? A climate expert explains

by bpckle | Jul 10, 2026 | In the Media

There’s nothing like gliding down a snow-covered slope.

That’s if you ask the thousands of people that make an annual pilgrimage to our alpine resorts during the Australian winter.

But this year, the start to the snow season has been far from spectacular.

While there is still some way to go before the typical peak of the season in mid- to late August, maximum snow depths have declined by around 30% since the middle of last century.

Given the underwhelming start to the season, many ski resorts are struggling to attract visitors and keep their lifts running. It’s also affecting local businesses, alpine communities and parents who hoped a school holiday skiing trip would keep their kids occupied.

So why is there so little snow this year? And what does it mean?

What shapes our snow season?

There are four main climate drivers that shape Australia’s alpine weather – including whether we get a good or bad snow season.

1. El Niño or La Niña

El Niño and La Niña refer to naturally occurring variations in temperature and winds over the Pacific Ocean that can influence weather around the world.

In Australia, El Niño years typically bring drier and warmer weather. In the eastern half of the country, this translates to below-average rainfall and warmer daytime temperatures during winter and spring. This also raises the risk of a shorter snow season. At the higher peaks, the season ends roughly two weeks earlier with maximum snow depths that are about 35cm less than average.

La Niña is the opposite to El Niño, characterised by higher rainfall and cooler temperatures in Australia. La Niña winters typically bring more snow. But occasionally mild temperatures in alpine regions can result in warm rain, the natural enemy of decent snow cover. This can mean some La Niña snow seasons can end abruptly due to spring rain.

Read more: The weather bureau has just declared an El Niño. What could this mean for Australia?

2. Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD)

The IOD is caused by changes in sea surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean. A positive IOD indicates cooler ocean temperatures in the eastern Indian Ocean, near Indonesia. This means south-eastern Australia typically receives less winter rain and snow. In contrast, a negative IOD generally means more snow falls across eastern Australia.

3. Southern Annular Mode (SAM)

The SAM tells us where the main weather systems that bring snow and rain – cold fronts and low pressure systems – are located over the Southern Ocean. If they are closer to Australia, this is known as a positive SAM. If they are closer to Antarctica than normal – where they draw up cold air and moisture – this creates a negative SAM.

We’re most likely to score a good snow season when La Niña, a negative IOD and a negative SAM all coincide. These conditions make Australia’s alpine regions colder and wetter than average, creating the ideal conditions for snow. We saw this in 2022 and 2025, the last two times when the peaks of the Snowy Mountains were blanketed in more than two metres of snow.

Read more: When is it going to snow? Getting a fix on what can make a good season

An underwhelming year

This snow season, none of the good-for-snow climate drivers have arrived.

In fact, we currently have an El Niño, a positive SAM and a neutral IOD, loading the dice for a drier and warmer winter in Australia.

As a result, we’ve seen a slow start to this year’s snow season. Ski resorts are battling warmer daytime temperatures, bouts of rain and warm soils, which mean snow tends to melt once it hits the ground.

Using machines to make artificial snow has helped. But conditions have sometimes been too humid to make snow.

The latest snow depths from July 7 show Spencers Creek in the Snowy Mountains had only 35cm of snow, and Mount Hotham just 28cm. We had similar poor starts to the snow season in 1957, 1967, 1982 and 1997.

Most recently, both 2023 and 2015 saw our snow-related climate drivers all point to a poorer snow season. On July 9 2015, less than 5cm of snow was on the ground at Spencers Creek, and just 9cm at Mount Hotham. That’s far less than our current 2026 totals.

On July 9 2023, Hotham had a much healthier 88cm, but that ended up being its maximum depth for the entire season. That’s well below its long-term average peak of 116cm.

A concerning trend

We’ve now had three poor starts – 2020, 2023 and 2026 – to the snow season in just seven years. And worryingly, the length of the snow season, snow depth and area of snow cover are all shrinking.

Global warming – driven by our continued burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas – is already reducing how much snow is falling. It’s also changing our alpine landscapes in Australia.

The world has now warmed by 1.44C and Australia by 1.59C, since the early 20th century. And research suggests climate change is gradually overtaking the traditional climate drivers which have, until now, largely shaped our snow seasons.

If we don’t curb our greenhouse gas emissions, our snow season is likely to slowly disappear. The good news is, the faster we abandon fossil fuels, the better our future winters will be.

Andrew B. Watkins is Climate Councilor with the Climate Council, and a member of the Protect Our Winters science alliance.

A big El Niño is likely. Australia needs to get ready now for drought, fire and the unknown

by bpckle | Jul 10, 2026 | In the Media

This year’s El Niño is expected to be strong to very strong, tilting the odds toward a hotter, drier winter and spring across southern and eastern Australia. Droughts, water shortages and a dangerous fire season become more likely.

It makes sense to prepare. But the size of the event isn’t set in stone.

For authorities, farmers and land managers, this poses a challenge – wait, and risk being unprepared, or act with a chance preparations may go to waste. Prescribed burn windows, water allocation deadlines and decisions about crop sowing all need to happen before the forecast solidifies.

Faced with decision problems like this, it’s best to stage interventions, starting with low-cost, low-regret actions and preparing contingency plans in case the worst happens.

Why are authorities worried?

Forecasters expect El Niño to keep strengthening into spring.

But a strong event doesn’t always mean worse conditions here. The very strong 1997–98 El Niño resulted in near-average rainfall in most of Australia, while the far weaker 2002–03 event helped produce the severe Millennium Drought.

The Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) climate driver can either intensify or weaken El Niño’s effect on Australia.

It’s not yet clear which way it will go, though models suggest it may switch from neutral to positive into spring. If it does, the chances of dangerous levels of drying increase substantially.

Over 2018 and 2019, these two climate drivers overlapped, causing intense drying ahead of the Black Summer bushfires. In 2023, they overlapped again, producing Australia’s driest three-month stretch on record.

We should know if they will overlap this year by late July or August.

From reacting to acting

It makes sense to lay out stages of action and do more as necessary, rather than waiting for certainty.

State government drought responses are largely structured like this.

But federal leaders have consistently relied on ad-hoc spending as droughts worsen rather than building resilience early, leading to worse outcomes for rural communities and a higher cost.

Similar criticism has been made of our bushfire response. A recent independent review found only 7% of federal disaster funds went to reduce risk and boost preparedness before the disaster.

So what would a staged approach look like?

Stage 1: low regrets

Some actions can be taken without regret because they cost little and build resilience. These would include:

• properly funding volunteer firefighter training and accreditation at state level. Volunteer firefighters do much of Australia’s firefighting but the sector is chronically underfunded

• create a national drought early warning system

• lift the legal barriers that prevent Traditional Owners practising cultural burning at scale. Cultural burning could match existing fuel reduction with far less ecological cost.

• build the national register of firefighting personnel, equipment and aerial assets the Bushfire Royal Commission recommended back in 2020. It is still not in place.

• expand existing advice services for farmers, such as financial counselling and on-farm advice for sowing decisions and livestock feed planning.

Stage 2: getting ready

If a positive IOD is confirmed, authorities should focus on actions too specific or too costly to justify now, but too important to improvise mid-crisis.

These could include:

• boosting staffing and readiness for agencies responsible for drought and bushfire response

• tying drought relief to observed conditions so support reaches farmers in weeks rather than months

• boost federal support for rural mental health early. At present, these measures require assessment after the disaster and sign-off from the prime minister

• confirm aerial firefighting capacity, cross-state emergency communications and potential defence force deployment in advance. This would avoid repeating Black Summer’s reactive scramble when more than 60 firefighting aircraft had to be sourced from overseas mid-crisis, incompatible radio systems left crews from different states unable to communicate directly, and defence force deployment only came after weeks of public pressure

• provide hospitals with access to better air-quality forecasts ahead of fire season, to allow preparation for surges in respiratory illness

• establish and resource more community-led networks such as the Red Cross’s Community-led Resilience Teams. These networks have proven critical to effective disaster response and recovery but are often left out of formal emergency management planning.

During and after disaster

Preparation ahead of time means authorities aren’t building capacity under pressure but simply trigger what’s already in place.

States use their incident control structures to coordinate police, fire, ambulance and the defence force under one chain of command.

Declaring a state of emergency unlocks legal powers and funding pathways agreed well in advance.

Evacuation orders go out through tested and proven public warning systems.

The same logic carries into recovery. Rapid damage assessment teams establish what’s needed where, feeding into the first wave of financial support — one-off emergency payments and short-term income assistance for people who’ve lost homes, livelihoods or income.

Recovery centres open as a single point of contact, so affected residents can access grants, counselling, insurance guidance and practical help in one place.

Failing to plan is planning to fail

An unprepared, improvised response doesn’t fail everyone equally – it punishes those with less capacity to compensate. A wealthy irrigator with secure water entitlements can weather a bad season better than a farmer reliant on the volatile temporary water market.

Similarly, First Nations communities repeatedly report being left out of disaster planning and facing unwelcoming treatment during a disaster response.

Australians are no strangers to natural disasters. What we have failed to do consistently is plan staged responses and begin as soon as a large event seems probable, rather than waiting for absolute certainty.

Lucas Vargas Zeppetello receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the USDA.

Em Murdock does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.