Rug up, Aussies! The country’s set for a freakishly cold winter

Aussies should gear up for a much colder than normal winter, with snow falling in places it hasn’t touched for a long time, according to a forecaster who uses an unusual method to predict the weather.

Amateur forecaster David Taylor, who runs the East Coast Weather Facebook page and claims to have predicted freakish weather events accurately in the past, uses sunspots to make predictions in a way major forecasters do not. He says that 2018 will possibly bring one of Australia’s coldest-ever winters, because the weather system will see effects that are normally only found in the Northern Hemisphere.

“Last winter most of Australia had up to 60 per cent chance of warmer than average winter! Now this time we have a 60 per cent chance of a colder than normal winter!” Taylor explains on his website. “That’s up to a 120 per cent turn around that’s amazing and huge.”

The forecaster noted that there was already evidence of an usually cold winter from the Northern Hemisphere, where the UK had been hit with heavy snowfall and freezing temperatures as a blast of Siberian weather dubbed ‘The Beast from the East’ swept across the country. The usually sun-kissed dunes of the Sahara Dessert were also been blanketed in snow for the third time in almost 40 years earlier this year. 

“So in other words yes its going to be cooler then normal over all and yes we can see snow in places that haven’t seen snow before or haven’t seen snow in a long time,” he wrote. 

According to Taylor we have just had the coolest February for a long time and it’s already snowing in Tasmania, “which is common but not in the magnitude”.

The forecaster claims to have predicted the exact path of 2013’s Tropical Cyclone Oswald 12 days before the storm hit, the 2012 floods that ravaged Queensland and the unprecedented 2017 hurricane season in the US, among other unusual weather events.

Are you ready for winter? Do you like the cold weather?