Spring

It is that time of the year again when the wildflowers come forth.
The weather starts to warm. This year the warmth has been a little hasty in its appearance on the scene

It is also when the weather fear-mongers start crawling out of the woodwork.
After spending a lot of the winter, sifting through the BOM's chicken entrails for some idea of the coming weather.

It is time to panic as his year apparently there is going to be a humungous drought with the companion fires.
Not necessarily in that order!

The annual fear process goes something like this. 
El Nino has suddenly appeared in the Pacific Ocean. There have been signs out on the farms for months now.
The BOM has been procrastinating over whether the entrails of the ocean and wind have aligned themselves so they can announce, with maximum fanfare "El Nino"

Where they hit is anyone's guess but they could be catastrophic or not as the case may be.

This apparently has come as a complete surprise to many in the weather bureaucracy even though the rhythm of weather appears nearly one and a quarter centuries ago in Dorothea Mackellar's poem "A Sunburnt Country"
Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine

She had the order right, we have just had 3 years of floods and according to the BOM we are heading into fires and drought [famine?]