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 + northern WA), "qld" for Queensland, "swaust" for Southwest Western Australia, "swquad" for the Southwest Region (SA + southern WA) and "victas" for Victoria&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 |
  [Corresponding values for other regions can be found here.]
  

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. See here for further information.

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 + northern WA), "Qld" for Queensland, "SWAust" for the Southwest Region (SA + southern WA), "SW-WA" for Southwest Western Australia and "VicTas" for Victoria&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 http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/ipcc/about_ipcc.php.

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 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.