The dictionary meaning of the adjective austral is “southern”. So, wherever you are on the planet, an austral wind is a wind from the south.
But when the word austral is used as an adjective with a noun in a scientific context, it means the southern hemisphere version of that noun. So the “austral summer” is “summer in the southern hemisphere” (usually the months December, January and February). This is in contrast with the “boreal summer”, which is summer in the “northern hemisphere” (June, July and August).
Austral does not mean “related to Australia. It means the “southern country”. The “-ia” at the ends of the names of lots of countries is a hangover from a convention to name areas in this way in Latin, the language of the Roman empire. So we have dozens of countries like this: Albania, Ethiopia, India, Namibia, Nigeria, Russia, Zambia. …
An expression that ought to be outlawed in science is “the Barn Swallows winter in Africa”. Those swallows that fail to cross the equator do winter in Africa, but those that cross the equator actually summer in Africa. Likewise, “autumn migration” (and “fall migration”) (ie the southwards migration after the breeding season in the boreal spring and the boreal summer in Eurasia and North America) becomes “spring migration” once the birds cross the equator. And what starts out as “autumn migration” from southern Africa and South America becomes “spring migration” once the birds cross the equator. There is no difficulty in talking about “southwards migration”, “northwards migration”, “breeding areas” and “non-breeding areas”.
One of the silly things that humanity did when they discovered the southern hemisphere was to use the same words for the seasons as they did in the northern hemisphere, except that they are out of phase by six months, which is as inverted as they can possibly be. Far more sensible would have been to invent new words for the boreal seaons. How about REMMUS for the boreal summer, RETNIW for the boreal winter, and GNIRPS for the boreal spring? To pronounce GNIRPS, we need to follow the long-established tradition of words like gnaw, gnat, gneiss, gnome, gnocchi and gnash, and have a silent gee at the start! Clearly NMUTUA doesn’t work for autumn, so we need to use the American equivalent fall, to get LLAF, and then invoke the precedent set by the pronunciation of the South American mammal, the llama.
Adopting gnirps, remmus, llaf and retwin for the seasons in the southern hemisphere would save a lot of boreals in scientfic papers. It would also prevent a lot of confusion during conferences presentations, when southern hemispherists totally lose their northern hemisphere audiences. We talk about summer, and we are thinking “December-January-February” and our audience is thinking “June-July-August”. We need to include a slide like this:
