A drier-than-average spring is expected to ensure drought conditions continue across Queensland, the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) says, after weekend rain did little to soften the ground.
Widespread falls were welcomed by many, but people in southern Queensland were particularly happy, with some describing it as the best single rain event since 2016.
Farmers happy but hesitant Cotton Australia chairman and St George farmer Hamish McIntyre said he had tipped some handsome totals out of the gauges at the weekend.
"We had 64mm on our property Strathmere, north of St George.
Where we live at St George there was 53mm, south of St George at Mooramanna we had 37mm, so we were very lucky.
"We never know what’s around the corner.
But not everyone was so lucky, with many farmers across Queensland disappointed with patchy rain.
More needed to turn paddocks green Currently 57.4 per cent of Queensland is drought-declared, including 23 councils and four part-council areas.
While weekend rainfall helped to settle the dust in some areas, much more is needed to green paddocks.
Ms Sharan said the rain had made a small dent to drought-affected areas, and farmers could expect a drier-than-average spring.

The coined “Day Zero” was initially to be expected this April, and with careful conservation of water, it was later pushed back to May 11.
This past week, however, Day Zero was pushed back to 2019, with no official prediction date.
Officials have stated that when Day Zero arrives, the government will turn off the pipes and begin rationing water.
Since the initial prediction, the city asked everyone to use less water, but over half the population ignored the warning.
“We’re using too much water, and we can’t contain it.
It’s tragic.” Cape Town recognized 20 years ago that this dreaded future may soon arrive.
Though the city’s population nearly doubled during this time, Cape Town excelled at managing its water resources.
As my colloquium professor would say, the city was managing its problem during the good times, but failed to prepare for a change in weather.
Day Zero in Cape Town may have been pushed back, but it’s still coming.
Cape Town isn’t the only major city in the world fighting a water crisis.

It is already bone dry in many regions and the forecast calls for a continuation of that weather pattern through much of Alberta, Saskatchewan and western Manitoba.
Winnipeg has had the driest start to a year since Environment Canada began tracking precipitation in 1872.
“A good portion of Manitoba really is in a desperate situation already and we’re just into the early part of May.” Strong winds haven’t helped conditions in the dry areas of the Prairies.
He is most concerned about eastern Saskatchewan and southern Manitoba, which will be parched for the longest period.
In the western Prairies, it is expected to be arid in June with timely showers and thunderstorms in southern and eastern Alberta and western Saskatchewan in July and August.
Daphne Cruise, crops extension specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture, said dry conditions are at the forefront of producers’ minds in the south coming off last year’s drought.
Many growers in the central part of the province were pleasantly surprised by last year’s yields given the dry conditions.
Harry Brook, crop specialist with Alberta Agriculture, said there is very little soil moisture in central and southern Alberta and the northern Peace region, making those areas susceptible to drought.
However, most of the Peace region is saturated and could use some drying down, so the dry and warm conditions would be welcome there.
If it was up to us, we’d rather not issue a forecast of precipitation but I know that’s all important to farmers,” he said.

‘Traveling’ droughts bring new possibilities for prediction.
A small subset of the most intense droughts move across continents in predictable patterns, according a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters by researchers in Austria and the United States.
The study could help improve projections of future drought, allowing for more effective planning.
These traveling droughts also tend to be the largest and most severe ones, with the highest potential for damage to the agriculture, energy, water, and humanitarian aid sectors.
"Most people think of a drought as a local or regional problem, but some intense droughts actually migrate, like a slow-motion hurricane on a timescale of months to years instead of days to weeks," says Julio Herrera-Estrada, a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering at Princeton, who led the study.
The researchers analyzed drought data from 1979 to 2009, identifying 1,420 droughts worldwide.
They found hotspots on each continent where a number of droughts had followed similar tracks.
What causes some droughts to travel remains unclear, but the data suggest that feedback between precipitation and evaporation in the atmosphere and land may play a role.
"This study also suggests that there might be specific tipping points in how large and how intense a drought is, beyond which it will carry on growing and intensifying," said Justin Sheffield, a professor of hydrology and remote sensing at the University of Southampton.
Sheffield was Herrera-Estrada’s advisor while serving as research scholar at Princeton.

Most research on climate change ecology is limited to the impacts of a single climate variable, such as temperature or water availability, on one trophic level at a time — and often on a single species. For instance, many studies have shown that increasing carbon dioxide levels can increase plant growth. While such studies can provide important insights, this narrow approach can also be ecologically and climatically unrealistic, according to a new paper by Yale researchers. Writing in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, two Yale scholars make the case that overly simplistic studies or experiments avoid the inherent complexity and interconnectedness of natural systems. As a result, they can yield erroneous climate predictions, they write. “Most of the climate change ecology research out there has been picking the low-hanging fruit for many years,” said Adam Rosenblatt, a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES) and lead author of the paper. “Often they study the effects of one type of variable. That’s obviously useful but it’s not realistic because in nature nothing exists in isolation.” The paper was co-authored by Oswald J. Schmitz, the Oastler Professor of Population and Community Ecology at F&ES. “The tradition in experimental analysis of climate change effects on ecosystems is to focus on one variable at a time. But this leads to a rather piecemeal and fragmentary picture of ecosystem functioning,” said Schmitz. “We propose a more integrative approach. While more complex, it will, nonetheless, help to unveil a more complete and coherent portrait of how real-world climate change will…

A new University of Illinois study puts climate change predictions in terms that farmers are used to: field working days.
In the new study, they coupled those models with climate change scenarios to forecast field working days into the future.
The models suggest that the typical planting window for corn will no longer be workable; April and May will be far too wet to work the fields in most parts of Illinois.
But we’ve already seen the trend for early planting.
Those drier, hotter summers are likely to change farming practices too, particularly in southern Illinois.
If farmers bet on the early planting window and get hit with a frost or more March precipitation than expected, are they out of luck?
Or farmers could choose shorter-season cultivars, planting early and then harvesting before the drought, possibly sacrificing yield.
That’s good, but I think we’ve fallen behind in the cropping system management side.
Given the weather in Illinois this late winter/early spring, this work seems particularly timely.
Changes in field workability and drought risk from projected climate change drive spatially variable risks in Illinois cropping systems.

Saving Lives by Predicting Global Drought.
Drought has long been hard to predict, but new research will now help forecasters develop early warnings.
But a new study could help because it reveals certain quite-specific geographic patterns that some regional droughts follow over and over again.
After analyzing thousands of droughts on all continents over a 30-year period, an international team of researchers found that about 10 percent of droughts follow predictable tracks.
The University of California–Irvine estimates that the California drought cost the state $1.8 billion and more than 10,000 jobs in 2015.
“It’s hard to predict where a drought might start.
But once the drought starts, if we understand the dynamics, we might be able to predict how it will evolve.” “For comparison, think of tropical cyclones.
“If we start seeing drought as dynamic events, as dry anomalies that travel, we might be able to forecast them in similar ways.
So we looked: What are the important physical drivers that make them move?
They found patterns on every continent and concluded that about 10 percent of the droughts — often the most intense — follow similar tracks.