About the Australian Rainfall and Surface Temperature Data

Analyses available

The Interactive Australian Rainfall and Surface Temperature portal allows users to download climate data for a regular (box shaped), user defined grid over the Australian continent.

The climate data is provided in two formats;
1. Annual mean timeseries graph of area averaged climate data.
2. Monthly mean timeseries of area averaged climate data.

All monthly timeseries values represent the spatial average (including meridional convergence) of grids within the user defined grid box.

The monthly timeseries data is output in ascii, with each row corresonding to 12 month years and following the format=(I4,12F7.2,F7.2) Values along each row are: Year < YYYY > , 12 Monthly Means < ±###.## > and Annual Mean (Sum for Rainfall) < ±###.## >.

Missing data are denoted by the special value -999.99

Users should note that although the selected grids may include areas of ocean, only land surface values are used in calculating the timeseries.

While the underlying data are updated each month, values for recent months should be considered preliminary as it can take several months to fully enter and quality-check all available rainfall data in the database.

Data Used

Rainfall

Mean rainfall timeseries are calculated using a 1 degree gridded dataset based on all available monthly rainfall totals. These data are available from 1900 onward. Prior to 1900 Australia's rainfall network was too sparse for reliable analyses.

Temperature

Timeseries are available for monthly maximum, minimum and mean Australian surface temperatures and diurnal temperature range (maximum-minimum temperature). These timeseries have been calculated from the Bureau of Meteorology's high quality 1 degree gridded dataset. These data are avalailable from 1950 onward, corresponding to the period of highest quality daily temperature observations. Values are expressed as anomalies relative to the 1961-1990 mean.
Extended mean annual temperature timeseries from 1910 to present for Australia, state and selected regions are avaliable from the Australian Climate Variability and Change webpages.

Terms of use

Please note that any use of these data should be acknowledged to the Bureau of Meteorology. Apart from the purposes of study, research, criticism and review, no part of these data may be reproduced, or redistributed for any commercial purposes, or distributed to a third party for such purpose, without written permission from the Director of Meteorology.

References

Della-Marta, P.M., Collins, D.A. and Braganza, K. 2004. Updating Australia's high-quality annual temperature dataset. Australian Meteorological Magazine, 53, 75-93.

Jones, D.A. and Weymouth, G.T. 1997. An Australian monthly rainfall dataset. Technical Report No. 70, Bureau of Meteorology, Australia.

Jones, D.A. and Trewin, B.C. 2000. The spatial structure of monthly temperature anomalies over Australia. Australian Meteorological Magazine, 49, 261-276.

Jones, D.A. and Trewin, B.C. 2002. On the adequacy of digitised historical Australian daily temperature data for climate monitoring. Australian Meteorological Magazine, 51, 237-250.

Lavery, B., Kariko, A. and Nicholls, N. 1992. A historical rainfall data set for Australia. Australian Meteorological Magazine, 40, 33-39.

Lavery, B., Joung, G. and Nicholls, N. 1997. An extended high-quality historical rainfall dataset for Australia. Australian Meteorological Magazine, 46, 27-38.

Torok, S.J. and Nicholls, N. 1996. A historical annual temperature dataset for Australia. Australian Meteorological Magazine, 45, 251-260.

Trewin, B.C. 2001. Extreme temperature events in Australia. PhD Thesis, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia.