Australian Meteorological Data

Abstract

THE Council for Scientific and Industrial Research of the Commonwealth of Australia has published valuable meteorological statistics under the title “Meteorological Data for Certain Australian Localities”(Pamphlet No.,42, Melbourne, 1933). A foreword explains that, for some time past, various investigators on the Council's staff had made extensive use of unpublished data collected by the Commonwealth Meteorological Bureau, in connexion with researches in soil science, entomology, plant industry, animal health, etc., and it was thought worth while to make such information more accessible to investigators by publishing selected data. The matter was discussed with the Meteorological Bureau, and it. was agreed that the Bureau should provide the data and arrange the material in a form suitable for publication, while the Council would bear the costs of publication. This pamphlet is the result of the co-operation of those two bodies. It gives in tabular form, for several hundred stations in Australia and Tasmania, mean monthly and annual values of daily maximum and minimum temperature and relative humidity, and average monthly and annual totals of rainfall. These averages refer to periods of varying length, as a rule not less than 15 years, and in not a few ease between 70 and 80 years. In the rare cases where the period is only five or six years, the figures may—especially in the case of such a variable quantity as rainfall—depart considerably from those that would be found over a suitably long period, but this drawback is nearly always met with in meteorological statistics for sparsely populated countries, and recourse must be had to such short records if large areas are not to be left unrepresented. A large folding map is attached at the end of the publication, which gives the meteorological divisions adopted by the Bureau and shows many of the stations included in the tables.