Notes to accompany Daily Weather Observations

These notes help explain some of the information on the Daily Weather Observations sheets. If you have any other questions, contact us.

These notes are also available as a PDF for printing (one page, 35 kb).

Data availability

These observations have been taken from the Bureau of Meteorology's "real time" system. Most of the data are generated and handled automatically. Some quality checking has been performed, but it is still possible for erroneous values to appear.

From time to time, observations will not be available, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes when the daily maximum and minimum temperatures, rainfall or evaporation are missing, the next value given has been accumulated over several days rather than the normal one day. It is very difficult for an automatic system to detect this reliably, so caution is advised. For more detail about this or any other data quality issue, contact us.

Summary statistics

The summary statistics (mean, lowest, highest and total) have been calculated using the data available at the time of preparation. Statistics are only calculated where it makes sense to do so (for example, "total maximum temperature" and "mean maximum wind gust" are not calculated, but "total rainfall" and "mean minimum temperature" are).

The extremes for each field are also indicated in the body of the table: the lowest value is shown in blue, and the highest value appears in red.

A hash mark (#) as the direction of an extreme wind indicates that speed occured more than once during the month, from more than one direction. For wind, the direction of the highest (or lowest) wind speed is shown, not the "highest" direction.

As new observations become available or observations are checked and modified, the statistics may change.

Updates

The table for the current month is updated twice a day: once in the late morning and again in the late afternoon. All observations for the month should be available with the morning update on the first day of the following month.

Earlier months are updated every few weeks.

Column meanings

To save space on the screen, most of the columns have abbreviated headings: