Breaking the drought: When two young Australians proved the world wrong about El Niño

Breaking the drought is the untold story of how two young Australian scientists proved the world’s leading meteorologists wrong about El Niño, and helped to establish modern seasonal forecasting.

If you lived in certain parts of the world in 1982 and 1983, you could have been forgiven for thinking the end was near.

Changes to ocean temperatures and negative impacts on food chains decimated populations of Galapagos penguins and Peruvian sea lions and fur seals.

Heavy rain and flooding in Ecuador led to a boom in mosquitos and caused major outbreaks of malaria.

Hurricane Iwa inflicted huge damage to Hawaii, where it contributed to the extinction of a native bird species, while parts of Indonesia and Australia suffered through some of the worst droughts ever recorded in the region.  

And as if that wasn’t enough, in Mexico a volcano known as El Chichón erupted three times in late March and early April 1982, destroying villages and killing nearly 2,000 people, while devastating local agriculture.

As it turns out, El Chichón – powerful as it was – did not cause the misery suffered around the Pacific Ocean, but it did have a hidden role to play in our attempts to understand this volatile weather.

The world’s leading meteorologists, based largely in the United States and Europe, came up short in their attempts to explain the ongoing phenomena, with many failing to recognise a pattern behind the apparent chaos. 

In Australia, though, where relentless drought created the perfect conditions for the Ash Wednesday bushfires of February 1983, two men – pushing against a tide of scepticism – were on the case.

Neville Nicholls and John McBride worked at the Australian Numerical Meteorology Research Centre, an organisation dedicated to furthering our scientific understanding of the weather, featuring scientists from both the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO.

Neville had already caught the eye among some of his peers through pioneering work in predicting year-to-year changes in the number of Australian tropical cyclones. 

And despite the misgivings of many colleagues, he and John were confident that El Niño, at the time relatively little known by the public, and not well understood even by scientists, was the culprit behind Australia and the world’s wild weather.

El Niño is one phase of a wider process known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which also includes La Niña and a neutral phase. 

We now recognise ENSO as a natural cycle in the Pacific Ocean that changes ocean temperatures and winds, influencing weather patterns like rainfall, droughts, and storms around the world.

But at the time most meteorologists could not see beyond the mathematical constraints of forecasting governed by the work of American mathematician Edward Lorenz. The father of Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect, Lorenz demonstrated the limits – even with powerful computer models – of attempting to accurately forecast the weather beyond a week or two, due to the huge complexity and myriad variations in initial atmospheric conditions.

Inadvertently, the brilliance of Lorenz blinded meteorologists to the less glamorous insights on offer from studying long-term statistics of temperature, rainfall and air pressure. 

They were further sidetracked by the effects of El Chichón, which spewed huge volumes of sulfur dioxide and other particles into the atmosphere, confusing early satellite observations and disguising the warming effect at play through 1982. 

Neville and John’s eyes, though, were wide open. And they may not have realised it at the time, but their gaze was set firmly on a path to establishing what we now recognise as seasonal forecasting.

“All hell was breaking loose,” John said in a recent interview with 21st Century Weather.

“1982 coincided with the worst El Niño or the most extreme El Niño in our working lifetime. No one had ever seen anything like the extent of dryness over Australia. All Australian meteorologists were looking in shock at this drought.”

Neville, meanwhile, recalls the extent of the scepticism the pair faced during conversations with colleagues. 

“An experienced and brilliant atmospheric scientist was visiting from England,” he said. 

“John and I were convinced that what we now call an El Niño event was already underway. This was in about May 1982 and he assured us that that was not true, and that all the Northern Hemisphere meteorologists agreed there is no El Niño going to happen in 1982.

“As late as October 1982, some of the great scientists who were working on the El Niño-Southern Oscillation in the Northern Hemisphere were still saying there is no El Niño, there will not be an El Niño this year or next year. And by that stage, Australia had been in a drought since about January 1982, and (air) pressures were enormously high over us. 

“This was a clear sign, to us, that an El Niño event was underway and would reduce rainfall in much of Australia through the rest of the year and into 1983,” Neville added.

“I was bemoaning the fact that these people were clearly wrong. I knew from the work of Ed Quayle that just by using simple statistical relationships, we can forecast that it was going to continue to be dry through the Australian spring and into at least early summer, with considerable confidence,” Neville said, referring to a Bureau of Meteorology scientist whose work in the early 1900s recognised the relationship between tropical air pressure and rainfall, but went largely unnoticed until later in the century.

“We faced enormous opposition for two reasons. Meteorologists at the time just refused to accept that we could actually make a forecast of anything more than about a week ahead. Because that was what we did with the weather, and they couldn’t understand the difference between weather and climate. They’re very intimately related, but they are different.”

Faced with such implacable opposition, John convinced a dubious Neville to co-author a scientific paper demonstrating their understanding of the relationship between the Southern Oscillation and Australian rainfall in spring and summer.

“No one’s ever going to be interested in this paper, so it will never be cited,” Neville said, recalling his initial doubts at the value of the exercise. 

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Published in the journal Monthly Weather Review in July 1983, ‘Seasonal relationships between Australian rainfall and the Southern Oscillation’ by John McBride and Neville Nicholls has been cited at least 857 times by other researchers, and is a seminal text in our understanding of the role of ENSO, particularly its influence on Australia’s seasonal weather and climate variability.  

“For many years afterwards, it ended up as our most cited paper,” Nevile said. 

“I was totally wrong. So I was good at predicting the climate, but nothing else could I predict.”

Such is the influence of the paper, and the esteem that Neville and John are held in, that a major review of ENSO knowledge was commissioned to mark the 40th anniversary of its publication.

Associate Professor Andrea Taschetto, a co-lead author of the review paper, said of the original work by John and Neville: “It’s a really large and complete picture of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and how it affects Australian rainfall with the data that they had at that time. So we consider it a landmark in our knowledge of ENSO and Australian rainfall.

“Neville is a fantastic researcher and John is as well. They advanced what we know about ENSO in Australia.

“The paper also talks about seasonality and really identifies that the Austral spring is a key season for those impacts on rainfall.

“It even talks about the decadal variability in a time when there was really limited data.”

The review paper, ‘Climate impacts of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation on Australia’, was published by Nature Reviews Earth & Environment in December 2025.

Researchers now understand so much more about ENSO, thanks in no small part to Neville and John’s groundbreaking paper.

But important questions about ENSO and its future remain, particularly as global average temperatures continue to steadily increase.

“There are uncertainties around how the El Niño-Southern Oscillation will change in the future,” Andrea said.

“We need to understand if the current cooling in the east Pacific will continue, or if there will be a warming in the east Pacific relative to the west.

“Because that affects the way that El Niño and La Niña manifest as well, and that has an impact for Australia.”

For Neville, the long-term influence of climate change from human activities on ENSO remains a key unknown: “Is there going to be a substantial change to the way the El Niño-Southern Oscillation operates as the world warms?”

And while it falls to younger colleagues to take their work forward and tackle the next round of technical and intellectual challenges, Neville and John can be satisfied that – working against the odds – they laid the foundations for such important progress. 

“It is nice in our career to have written a paper that has motivated other people,” Neville said.

“We also appreciate this opportunity just to remind our younger colleagues that we’re not dead,” he added, with a gleam in his eye.

By Iain Strachan, Senior Advisor – Engagement & Impact, 21st Century Weather & Monash University