Climate History Australia

Climate History Australia is a landmark initiative to reconstruct Australian climate over past centuries. Using historical records, our team pieces together past climate variability and extremes to understand their influence on Australian society over time.

2021: Reconstructing Perth’s pre-industrial climate
Earlier in 2021, we released a paper with our analysis of Perth’s historical weather data from 1830 to 1975. However, there’s a gap in the Perth record between 1876 and the beginning of the Bureau of Meteorology’s (BoM) daily weather records in 1897.

Fortunately, we found observations in journals kept at the National Archives of Australia (NAA) taken at the Perth Survey Office from 1880 to 1884 and also the Botanic Gardens from 1885 to 1900 which provided a big part of the missing link needed to connect these records. With the help of 1,800 volunteers on Zooniverse, we closed a 20 year gap in Perth's historical climate record!

We’re still keen to try to track down the remaining gaps in Perth's daily weather record. In particular, it would be ideal if we can find daily journals between the start of 1876 to the end of 1879, as it would provide a link between the historical observations and modern BoM records. We know daily observations were taken, as there are yearly and monthly summaries published in The West Australian Yearbook 1900-1901 [large PDF download] and The Climate of Western Australia, 1876-1899 [large PDF download]. We are keen to hear from those who may have leads on the daily observations between 1876-1879. In addition, there's only sparse daily data for the pressure in Perth from 1908 to the early-1940s. If you think you have good leads to help us in our searches for the original daily journal records, please email us at info@climatehistory.com.au.

2020: Reconstructing Adelaide’s pre-industrial climate
In June 2020, our researchers published Australia’s longest daily temperature record. We identified a decrease in cold extremes and an increase in heatwaves since 1838 in the Adelaide region of South Australia. We used hundreds of historical newspapers and documents to reconstruct the impact of past temperature extremes. You can read our paper in the scientific journal, Climate Dynamics, here.

However, there was a gap in this Adelaide record from 1848 to 1856. Fortunately, we tracked down a series of old weather journals in the NAA to fill the gap. In November 2020, we completed a citizen science project on Zooniverse which transcribed these records. With the help of over 1,100 citizen scientists on Zooniverse, we recovered over 33,400 valuable historical weather observations filling this eight-year data gap in Adelaide’s climate record!

These newly transcribed observations can now help link together historical and modern weather observations to provide a near-continuous weather record for Adelaide back to 1836, and Perth back to 1830. These records are some of the longest in the Southern Hemisphere, providing valuable data to global datasets.