Record hot year causes fire emergency in Australia

With temperatures remaining above 30°C and with wind gusts of up to 100 kilometres an hour, conditions favour the fires, and this weather is expected to continue.

Climate models predict the worst fire weather will be increasingly common in NSW, but the ferocity of the current fires was not caused by particularly bad fire weather, says climate scientist Andy Pitman from the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Instead, it was the result of a very warm winter – the second warmest on record in NSW and part of Australia's warmest 12 months on record– which was probably caused by climate change, according to Pitman.