Australia Weather News

As the mercury plummets across South Australia ahead of winter, coastal properties are preparing for the inevitable storm surges.

Last year saw coastal infrastructure cop the worst of the wild weather whipped up by the high winds of vigorous cold fronts.

The historic Port Germein jetty got hammered in May and was smashed again soon after it reopened in the September storm that caused a state-wide blackout.

Senior climatologist from the Bureau of Meteorology, Darren Ray, says it is unlikely this year will see the same kind of weather patterns.

"Last year was a pretty unusual year in terms of the climate influences we saw," he said.

"We saw what we call a negative phase of the Indian ocean dipole pattern last year.

"So basically what that means is we saw very warm oceans off the north-west of Australia feeding lots of moisture across the country."

Mr Ray said this created the heavy rainfall over the cooler months, through to the end of the year.

He said record winds blew across the state during this time as well, but it is a weather pattern unlikely to be repeated this year.

"We're looking at something very traditional this year," he said.

"There's about a 50 per cent likelihood that we'll see an El Nino event develop this year, so something a little more like 2015 possibly."

Preparing for the swells

Meanwhile, shack owners at Chinaman Wells on South Australia's Yorke Peninsula are not taking any risks.

They hope a seawall currently being built will prevent their homes from eventually being swallowed by the sea.

Shack owner Doug Pritchard says last year's storms were the worst he had seen in his 25 years in the area.

"When we got smashed in May we lost probably three metres of dune and inundation in some of the shacks," Mr Pritchard said.

He said the coast was able to come back from that, but then the September storm struck.

"It was the perfect storm. You got a combination of low pressure, large tides, a strong westerly wind, and that just pushed the water right up to heights we've never seen before."

He said a 550-metre sea wall made of large rocks to break up the energy of waves during a storm, protecting the coast and properties, is about half complete.

"There's a lot of nervous people down there, and we're coming up to the period where we copped our first storm last year," he said.

"We've got 26 shacks in this project, most of which have come on board.

"It's a $750,000 project so each shack is up for between $23-35,000 each to get the wall in front of their shack."

Mr Pritchard said about 100m of the wall protected crown land, which was also the shack owners' responsibility.

Delays due to equipment problems has pushed back the wall's completion date to the end of May.

"Fingers crossed we don't see another event. It was a rare event, but fingers crossed we don't see one of those again," Mr Pritchard said.