Australia May Have No More Winter By 2050

Depending on where you live, winter can either be a time to escape the heat for a bit or a sad string of months spent buried in snow with bitter cold. If you are in Australia, a new tool created by Dr. Geoff Hinchliffe and Associate Prof. Mitchel Whitelaw from the School of Art & Design with help from the ANU Climate Change Institute predicts you may only have a few more decades to worry about winter. According to the tool, there will be no more winter in Australia by 2050.The tool the researchers created visualizes data, and the tool claims that by 2050 winter as Aussies know it will no longer happen. Instead, in the former winter months, the scientists say Australians will deal with a new season called "New Summer." The New Summer season is described as a period of the year where temperatures consistently peak in some cases at above 40-degrees Celsius (over 100 degrees Fahrenheit) for a sustained period.

Hinchliffe says that in 30 years time winter as we know it will be "non-existent" going on to say that winter will cease to be everywhere but a few places in Tasmania. The tool uses data from the Bureau of Meteorology and Scientific Information for Land Owners (SILO) data to show how many degrees the average temperature will rise in each location and how many days over 30 or 40 degrees a place will have in 2050 compared to today.

The tool created is designed to be visually rich and interesting according to the creators. It uses color, shape, and size around a dial to show a year's worth of temperature values in a snapshot.

The scientists say they don't want to misrepresent the data or suggest things that aren't true. The tool they created conveys data in a way that can be interrogated and is described as being "like a graph, but more poetic." The tool can be viewed here.