If you've been thinking the seasons have felt out of whack this year, you'd be right.
Several towns and cities in New South Wales and the ACT experienced a March hotter than the whole of summer by some metrics.
And Sydney has come away with its highest ever average maximum temperature for the month — no small feat given the data goes back 165 years.
"It's quite a significant marker to see a March maximum temperature above anything we've seen in the past 100 years," Bureau of Meteorology climatologist Hugh McDowell said.
New South Wales wasn't the only state that experienced a hot March. But a prolonged wet and stormy change in the final week of the month snatched away the prospect of breaking the March heat record for most other places.
However, a large swathe of the country stretching from Western Australia's Gascoyne, through central Australia, and into New South Wales and south-east Queensland has finished the month with maximum temperatures well above the norm.
Mr McDowell said the higher-temperature pattern offered a glimpse into where it was coming from — fanned across the country from Australia's "heat engine".
"It's sort of built up in the centre of the country and it's been funnelled either way, east and west," he said.
Across the capitals, Brisbane also finished the month well above the average for March.
Perth, Canberra, Darwin, and Hobart were slightly warmer than normal while Melbourne and Adelaide were slightly cooler.
Rebound from La Niña behind heat
The season transition felt like whiplash at times, coming off the back of one of the coolest summers in more than a decade for parts of eastern and central Australia.
Mr McDowell said it was not uncommon to see a "rebound" in weather conditions after a big climatic event like La Niña.
"It's not unusual to see the dial swing the other way," he said.
He said the earlier end to La Niña would have made it more noticeable.
"This [year] has been unusual because we've had a La Niña and then La Niña has started to end sooner than you'd usually see," he said.
"And that's made a big difference. We normally don't see any breaking down until into the winter."
Mr McDowell said another climate driver, known as the Southern Annular Mode (SAM), contributed to the hotter weather.
The SAM relates to the position of a belt of winds south of the country that helps carry storm tracks from west to east.
In a "negative" phase, which was for most of the month, it helps push dry air from inland into the south-east of Australia leading to warmer, drier weather.
Are the seasons changing?
Research from The Australia Institute in 2020 found that over the past two decades, summers in the most populous areas of Australia were "a month longer" than they were in the 1950s and 60s.
"Temperatures that marked the start of summer now come around two weeks earlier; temperatures that marked the end of summer now come around two weeks later," the report said.
But climatologist Blair Trewin said, in general, December to February was still the hottest part of the year.
"We do see a warming trend quite consistently for Australia as we do globally," Dr Trewin said.
"One of the things that means is the average temperatures we see in early autumn we might have seen at the end of summer 50 years ago.
"But there's not really a change of seasons in the sense that there's no real evidence of a shift in the time of year that is the hottest time of year."
Dr Trewin said the local Indigenous seasons were often better at describing seasonal patterns, several of which featured six seasons rather than four in southern Australia.
