Building your 'weather' skills

Learning about the climate of your region

A good starting point for forecasting weather at any location is to develop knowledge of the local climate, including such things as the average monthly rainfall and average maximum and minimum temperatures.

Much of this information is on the Bureau of Meteorology's web site.
This segment shows how you can obtain this information for a small Victorian town - Dunolly - which does not have its own long-term climate record, but is close enough to Bureau stations to allow inferences about likely conditions.

Dunolly is 50km WSW from Bendigo and 20km north of Maryborough. The nearest Bureau stations with long-term climate records are at Maryborough and Maldon.

To get information on average conditions at these places -

• Go to the Bureau's Home Page
• Look for 'Climate Services'
• Click on 'Climate Averages'
• Scroll to heading 'Tables of averages for specific locations'
• Select 'Victoria'
• Select 'Maryborough' or 'Maldon'
• Print the data sheet

There are many interesting things to be learned from the Maryborough tables. For instance -

• The variation in average daily maximum temperatures between summer (28.7°C) and winter (12.2°C).
• On average more rain falls in winter than in summer (e.g. 56.3mm in June compared to 30.1mm in January.)
• In some months (November, December, January, February, March, April, May) the lowest rainfall on record is zero.
• The highest monthly rainfall ever recorded was 186.7mm in February.
• The highest daily rainfall recorded was 99.3mm in October and December.