September 3rd, 2026The Wettest “Dry” Winter We’ve Ever Had

This content was created in partnership with Google Trends.

How Victoria’s Google search history, and Clarkes Hill’s rain gauge, both called out the Bureau’s “super El Niño” this winter.

This content was created in partnership with Google Trends.

Google Trends data has confirmed what one Clarkes Hill local Robert Grieve suspected all along: this winter didn’t just break the Bureau of Meteorology’s forecast, it broke Victoria’s search habits too. Somebody needs to have a word to the Bureau, because either their computer’s broken or Clarkes Hill didn’t get the memo.

Back in April, the story hit everywhere at once. A super El Niño was coming, they said. Possibly the strongest on record. Rivers and dams would drop, the Murray-Darling would struggle, farmers would watch their wheat crops shrivel, and the whole east coast should brace for warm, dry, below-average rainfall right through winter and into spring. It was the kind of story that gets picked up, shared, and typed into a search bar by everyone within a hundred kilometres of a rain gauge.

And it did. I pulled twelve months of Google Trends data for Victoria and it tells the story plainly enough. From September last year right through to the end of March, search interest in “el niño” sat at zero. Flat, for seven straight months. Then in the second week of April, it jumps from nothing to the highest spike in the entire dataset, virtually overnight. That’s not a slow build of curiosity. That’s a headline landing on a Tuesday and search interest across half of Victoria climbing by Thursday.

Fair enough too. The papers were saying sea surface temperatures in the Pacific had jumped more than a degree since January, the fastest swing from La Niña to El Niño since 1976. The Bureau’s own modelling was tipping a record-breaking event. If you own a dam, a crop, or a garden, that’s worth a search.

The 12-month search interest timeline for “el niño” (VIC), showing the flat line from September through March and the April spike. Caption: “Source: Google Trends.” A second panel comparing “el niño” against the recent “la niña” upticks would work well alongside it.

Here’s the bit that doesn’t add up. While all of Victoria was busy searching “el niño” and bracing for drought, the rain at Clarkes Hill was doing the exact opposite of what the story promised.

I’ve got the rainfall figures going back to 2016, and this winter just gone, the one that was supposed to be dry, delivered 459.4mm between June and August. Compare that to 353.4mm over the same months in 2016, and 318.2mm in 2025. That’s not a marginal difference. That’s roughly 30 to 45 per cent more rain than either of the other two years, arriving in the exact window we were told to expect the taps to turn off.

By the end of August we’d already had 700.2mm for the year, well ahead of where 2025 sat at the same point (469.8mm) and comfortably past 2016 too (618.8mm). If the current trend holds, we’re on track for somewhere around 1,180 to 1,190mm for the full year. That would make 2026 the wettest of the three years by a clear margin, not the driest.

So somewhere between the modelling and my back paddock, something’s gone sideways. Maybe it’s the Indian Ocean Dipole throwing its weight around, which the Bureau themselves admit can amplify or soften whatever El Niño’s doing. Maybe Clarkes Hill just sits in one of those pockets that answers to nobody. Either way, the forecast said dry, and the sky said otherwise, loudly, for three months straight. And Clarkes Hill is simply where I got the data from, all over the Central Highlands the word is damp.

And now the search data’s throwing up something else worth watching. “La niña” barely registered a pulse in this whole twelve-month stretch. One random blip back in November, then near-silence for the better part of a year. But in the last three weeks of data, it’s shown up every single week for the first time. Small numbers, 2 and 3, nothing dramatic. But that’s exactly the shape “el niño” had back before its own breakout in April. Zero, zero, zero, then suddenly everyone’s searching for it.

Whether that means La Niña’s quietly working its way back into the conversation, or just a few sharp locals starting to wonder if the “super El Niño” ever actually turned up, I couldn’t tell you. What I can tell you is that if you’ve been out fixing your gutters, topping up the tank, or watching the dam creep back up the bank this winter, you’ve got the actual data to back up what you already knew. The forecast promised us a drought. Clarkes Hill gave us a flood warning instead.

And for Robert, he says if it does become a dry year, that’s great. The dams are all full and the farmers need a dry spell. Somebody should probably tell the Bureau.

This content is part of a paid partnership with Google to promote Google Trends. It uses Google Trends data to explore search interest in “el niño” and “la niña” across Victoria over the past twelve months. Google Trends data is aggregated and anonymous. Search interest is measured on a relative scale and does not represent total search volume.

By Kyle Barnes