A historical climate dataset for southeastern Australia, 1788-1859

Linden Ashcroft; Joelle Gergis; David John Karoly

Journal article

A historical climate dataset for southeastern Australia, 1788-1859

Linden Ashcroft, Joelle Gergis, David John Karoly

GEOSCIENCE DATA JOURNAL | WILEY | Published : 2014

DOI: 10.1002/gdj3.19

Abstract

There is a significant lack of historical climate data in the Southern Hemisphere compared to the northern latitudes. To address this data scarcity and to improve understanding of regional climate variability, historical instrumental observations were recovered for southeastern Australian (SEA) for the 1788–1859 period. Instrumental observations of temperature, atmospheric pressure, rainfall and raindays were rescued from 39 archival sources, and examined to identify observer biases and inhomogeneities. The rescued data provide continuous information on SEA climate variability from 1826 to 1859, with short periods of observations identified between 1788–1791, 1803–1805 and 1821–1824. Quality..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Linden Ashcroft Author

Joelle Gergis Author

David Karoly Author

Related Projects (2)

ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR CLIMATE SYSTEM SCIENCE

Reconstructing pre-20th century rainfall, temperature and pressure for south-eastern Australia using palaeoclimate, documentary and early weather station data.

South-eastern Australia is in the grip of a severe water crisis due to the worst drought in recorded history and increasing temperatures. Th..

Grants

Awarded by Australian Research Council Linkage Project

Funding Acknowledgements

This study was conducted as part of the South Eastern Australian Recent Climate History (SEARCH) project, supported by the Australian Research Council Linkage Project LP0990151. LA and DK were also supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, and LA is grateful for the additional funding from the University of Melbourne Albert Shimmins Postgraduate Writing Up Award. We acknowledge Tony Rogers from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology History Unit in Adelaide and Derek Reid, formerly of CSIRO, for generously sharing their digitised data. Many thanks to the staff of the State Library of New South Wales for their assistance in locating many of the historical records used in this study, and to Mitchell Black, Matt Howie, Felix Sheldon and Sam Hannah for their assistance in digitising a number of the observations. We are also grateful for the assistance and advice from Kiri Whan, Blair Trewin, Claire Fenby and three anonymous reviewers, which helped improve this manuscript.