Exceptional Circumstances Report
This page provides links to the report An assessment of the impact of climate change on the nature and frequency of exceptional climatic events and its accompanying Supplementary Information, prepared by CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology for the Australian Government's National Review of Drought Policy. Funding for the report was provided by the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.
Data from the Exceptional Circumstances Report
Historical data
The historical rainfall and temperature data are organised into seven sets of uncompressed TAR archives of ASCII text files, one file for each time series. Study regions are denoted in the file names by 'aust' for Australia, 'murrdarl' for the Murray-Darling Basin, 'nsw' for New South Wales, 'nwquad' for the Northwest Region (NT and northern WA), 'qld' for Queensland, 'swaust' for Southwest Western Australia, 'swquad' for the Southwest Region (SA and southern WA) and 'victas' ( Victoria and Tasmania). The periods are denoted by 'cy' for calendar year (January to December) values, 'fy' for financial year (July to June) values, and '2y' for biennial (January to December) values.
Time series of percentage area below the 5th percentile
| rainfall | minimum temperature |Time series of percentage area above the 95th percentile
| rainfall | minimum temperature | mean temperature | maximum temperature |Time series of areally-averaged annual values - rainfall totals in mm, temperature anomalies (calculated with respect to the base period 1961–1990) in °C.
| rainfall totals and temperature anomalies |
The historical monthly rainfall and annual temperature gridded analyses used to generate the above-mentioned data sets can be purchased from the Bureau of Meteorology.
Projections data
The projections data are organised in uncompressed TAR files of Excel spreadsheet files, one for each region. The spreadsheets contain results for each of the 13 climate models. Study regions are denoted in the file names by 'MDB' for the Murray-Darling Basin, 'NSW' for New South Wales, 'NWAust' for the Northwest Region (NT and northern WA), 'Qld' for Queensland, 'SWAust' for the Southwest Region (SA and southern WA), 'SW–WA' for Southwest Western Australia and 'VicTas' (Victoria and Tasmania).
Time series of percentage area below the 5th percentile
| rainfall | soil moisture – historical and projections data |Time series of percentage area above the 95th percentile
| mean temperature |
The climate model data (rainfall, temperature and potential evaporation) for the 13 models used in the report can be downloaded from Program for Climate Model Diagnosis & Intercomparison.
Citing the data
The citation for these data is Hennessy et al. (2008): 'An assessment of the impact of climate change on the nature and frequency of exceptional climatic events'. A consultancy report by CSIRO and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology for the Australian Bureau of Rural Sciences, 33pp, www.bom.gov.au/climate/droughtec/.
Downloading and extracting the data
In order to download the TAR files containing the Report data, it will be necessary to have 'File Download' enabled on your browser, and be able to download TAR/WinZip archive files. If you are having trouble downloading these files, you can contact us but charges will apply for supplying these data via other media.
Unless otherwise noted, all maps, graphs and diagrams in this page are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence
