Australian: IT has been labelled the cousin of El Nino, the Indian Ocean’s equivalent of the climatic engine in the Pacific that drives the cycle of droughts and floods in Australia’s southeast. But when CSIRO scientist Wenju Cai factored the Indian Ocean Dipole into his climate model, he found that this little cousin could contribute to droughts. It could depress spring rainfall by up to 30 per cent in Australia’s southeast, a region encompassing the nation’s food bowl, the southern …